Ubuntu Wiki

Overview

Supported Gestures

On some systems, Unity has support for some system gestures, and you can try those out right away. Here's a list:

• 3 finger pinch to maximize/restore windows
• 3 finger press and drag to move window
• 3 finger touch to show grab handles

• 3 finger double tap -> switches to previous window

• 3 finger tap followed by 3-fingers hold -> shows window switcher

  • drag those 3-fingers -> change selected window icon

  • release fingers -> selects window and closes switcher

• 3 finger tap followed by 3-fingers hold -> shows window switcher

  • release fingers -> switcher will kept being shown for some seconds still

  • drag with one or three fingers -> change selected window

  • release finger(s) -> selects window and closes switcher

• 3 finger tap followed by 3-fingers hold -> shows window switcher

  • release fingers -> switcher will kept being shown for some seconds still

  • tap on some window icon -> selects that icon and closes the switcher

• 4 finger swipe left/right to reveal launcher (if the dock autohide is enabled)
• 4 finger tap to open dash

Some applications support 2 finger gestures. However, note that 2 finger gestures require extra setup for touchpads in Ubuntu. Also please note that your system may not be supported out of the box, or at all.

Legacy Applications

Ginn provides users with the ability to add gestures for applications that do not directly support gestures. Ginn supports everything from photo viewers and text editors to window managers! Ginn is not installed by default, and has been moved to universe repositories as of Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal)

About

The Wiki

This resource features information about multitouch support for Ubuntu, including:

• drivers for a range of hardware
• a gesture processing system which does the heavy lifting of gesture analysis
• APIs for developers who want to build gestures into their apps
• support for gesture-based window management in Unity

Touch Overview

The Ubuntu gesture recognition framework includes several different components and is associated with various tools and projects:

• kernel drivers (evdev, mtdev)
• a display server (currently only X is supported; there are future plans for Wayland)
• Grail - the gesture recognizer
• GEIS - platform/distro agnostic API for gestures
• Support in toolkits (Qt, GTK)
• Support for legacy applications (Ginn)

See the "In-Depth" section below for more information on the projects various aspects (including current work). Architectural information is available there as well.

For the full list of projects related to touch/gesture recognition, be sure to see the "Projects" section on this page:

• https://launchpad.net/canonical-multitouch

Joining the Community

• Ubuntu Multitouch dev mailing list

In-Depth

• Definitions - A glossary of terms we use when discussing touch/gesture recognition technology, both at the user-experience and engineering levels

• Hardware Support

• Testing - This covers getting started, checking your hardware (and our stack), and community-driven QA

• Development - How to contribute and related resources

• Current Work - What's happening this cycle, including information on the current architecture

Other pages

Over time we have collected many pages of useful information. Unfortunately, much of it has fallen out of date. You may find some helpful information in one of the subpages below, but please bear in mind that only pages linked above are currently maintained.