Thursday, March 14, 2013

Multi-touch gestures in Mutter-based compositors

A customer has asked for documentation on handling multi-touch gestures in their Mutter-based compositor (see my previous post) and I thought that it could be a good idea to have it in the GNOME wiki, in case it helps when they are added to GNOME Shell:

Multi-touch gestures in Mutter-based compositors

I'm not sure of what would be the best use for multi-touch gestures in the Shell, probably for resizing windows (with a 4-finger pinch gesture) or for switching desktops (with a 3 or 4 finger swipe). Probably some ideas can be taken from the multi-tasking gestures in recent versions of iOS, such as using pinch gestures to activate hidden panels or to switch to another views.

Something I feel strongly is about restricting system-wide gestures to more than 3 fingers, because the user experience and the implementation gets quite complicated if the compositor and the applications need to compete for touch sequences in similar gestures.

It's currently a bit convoluted due to zero support in Mutter for touch events, but once the Shell starts using touch events, I think it will make sense to move some of the setup and boilerplate into Mutter.

Once more, thanks to my employer Collabora for sponsoring this work: