Touche Is A New GUI To Configure Touchegg (Multi-touch Gesture recognizer For Linux)
Touche is a new desktop application to configure Touchegg, a multi-touch gesture recognizer for Linux.
After not receiving any updates for about 5 years, Touchegg was completely rewritten fairly recently to work with the new technologies that are now available on the Linux desktop, as well as to add new features.
The application runs in the background, transforming the multi-touch gestures you make on your touchpad into various desktop actions. It supports swipe and pinch multi-touch gestures, and it also features touchscreen support which allows pinch, swipe and tap gestures. For example, you can minimize a window by swiping down using 3 fingers, pinch in using 2 fingers to zoom in, etc.
To configure Touchegg, users need to edit a configuration file. This is where Touche, the new Touchegg GUI, comes in (created by the same developer).
Using this new desktop application, you can configure global swipe, pinch and tab (with the latter only available for touchscreens) gestures, as well as custom per-application gestures. So for example, you can use custom gestures for your web browser, file manager, etc.
Available gestures:
- Swipe with 3 or 4 fingers: Up / Down / Left / Right
- Pinch with 2, 3 or 4 fingers: In / Out
- Tap with 2, 3, 4 or 5 fingers (only available on touchscreens)
Available actions:
- Maximize or restore a window
- Minimize a window
- Tile a window
- Toggle fullscreen mode
- Close a window
- Switch desktop
- Show desktop
- Keyboard shortcut
- Execute a command
- Mouse click
To add custom gestures for a particular application, click the + icon in the lower left-hand side corner of the application window. Once you do this, your mouse cursor changes to a + cursor. Now click on the application for which you want to add custom multi-touch gestures, and the application will be added to the Touche sidebar, allowing you to set custom gestures.
This new Touchegg GUI doesn't come with any settings, tray icon or anything like that. It only allows configuring Touchegg using a graphical user interface, which should make things a lot easier, especially for users that are not used to editing configuration files.
Touche also makes it easier to add Touchegg by default to Linux distributions, although direct integration in the system settings would probably be better. By the way, Elementary OS is already including Touchegg by default in the upcoming release.
Download Touche
Touche is packaged as a flatpak on Flathub, so install it from there (see the Flathub quick setup if you haven't done this already), and as a DEB package for Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint / Pop!_OS.
You can also find instructions for building this from source on its hacking page. This includes instructions for Debian / Ubuntu (including for creating a DEB package yourself) and Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS and derivatives.
To use Touche, you'll also need to install Touchegg (which is currently packaged as a DEB and RPM; there's also a third-party AUR package for Arch Linux / Manjaro).
