Multi-touch Gestures in elementary OS 6
One of the most hotly requested features for years has been to have multi-touch gestures in elementary OS, and with 6.0 I’m excited to say that we will deliver. Like the dark style preference, delivering a great multi-touch experience is a little more complicated than it seems on the surface. There have been some 3rd party tools to detect touchpad gestures and then trigger actions after-the-fact, but it wasn’t until recently that we’ve had the technical ability to provide smooth, responsive animations that track 1:1 with your finger movement across a touchpad or touch screen.
We’ve had the great pleasure of working with José Expósito, the author of Touchégg, on our window manager gestures. In elementary OS 6, we use Touchégg Daemon behind the scenes to capture input events and communicate them to Gala, our window manager.
At the moment, we’re reviewing two proposals: one for the multitasking view and another for switching workspaces directly. Both of these use 1:1 responsive, finger-tracking gestures that can be peeked or canceled at any time. When special animations aren’t available in the window manager, such as when tiling, we fall back to animations built in to Touchégg.
