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:

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.