Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Multi-touch gestures in Gnome Shell

I'm keeping this small branch in which touch event support is added to Mutter. Plug-ins can register to get touch events before any other client and then accept or reject touch sequences depending on whether the shell is interested on the gesture or not.

As can be seen in this example of a mutter plug-in, any subclass of ClutterGestureAction can be used, which includes gesture recognizers for pan, zoom and rotate actions, but creating new recognizers is pretty easy.

The mutter branch is up for reviewing in bugzilla and any comments on the approach will be very welcome. And if anybody wants to play with multi-touch gestures in Gnome Shell, please link to your work from the wiki so we can track it.

If anybody from the design team has already started thinking about this, I would be very glad to hear their thoughts on this.

As always, I'm grateful to my employer Collabora for sponsoring this work, and I hope GNOME benefits from it.