3 finger touchpad swipe support

Is this an Asahi limitation, a Wayland limitation or a limitation of KDE? I started by looking into wtype

Id like to set a three finger up touchpad swipe to bring up a window switcher

I tried

wtype -P F3
but seems that does not work, output below
Compositor does not support the virtual keyboard protocol

F3 or Command+W would work

wlrctl ?
wlroots ?

Where do I start?

KDE has built-in trackpad gestures that work out of the box, but they are not configurable. See here for an overview of the existing gestures.

I imagine in the future this will have some kind of configuration system, but for now this is what you get.

If you want to use third-party tools to automate KDE, look into using DBus commands to trigger your actions. But I doubt any kind of trackpad gesture thing will work in Wayland as a third party app; this feature really needs to be built into the compositor since apps can’t snoop on input by default.

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Maybe its a bug that 3 finger swipe isnt working then?
Im on 5.27.7 and 3 finger swipe is not in the trackpad options and nothing happens when I 3 finger swipe.

Three finger swipe switches virtual desktops, but you need to create some first for that to work (you can do that in the settings, or four finger pinch and click the button at the top). As I said it’s not configurable, so there is nothing in the trackpad options page.

Oh, interesting. You are correct, three finger swipe left and right work but not three finger up. 4 finger pinch works as well but have you ever tried that? That is not a natural or easy gesture. I guess Ill have to wait for it to mature. I wonder if I should be using Gnome and not KDE? Thanks for the info Hector!

Oh I agree, four finger pinch is… uh, a questionable choice. I can do it reliably with my four non-thumb fingers with a bit of practice, but it’s awkward.

Three finger up/down does work too, but in that case you need to set up your virtual desktops as a 2D grid (System Settings → Virtual Desktops, then increase the row count there).

GNOME has, well, other issues on these platforms (like not being able to control the keyboard backlight). I think it also still has fractional scaling issues with Xwayland? In the end no DE is perfect, though I’ve had better luck pushing patches to improve Apple Silicon support with KDE.

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are plasma touchpad gestures configurable now? i look forward to having 4-finger swipes to control volume

There’s this but nothing upstream yet as far as I know.

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