How to get position of fingers on touchpad












1














I want to develop a program which would be able to make use of absolute position of fingers on a touchpad to define custom in-app gestures. I've read that using raw data from evdev is a really bad idea as there are many hardware-specific quirks that I'd need to handle and I'd end up rewriting libinput.



I would like to get events like touch begin, touch end, touch move for individual fingers, each event including absolute position and ideally pressure of the touch.



So is there a way to get this information from libinput? And possibly temporarily disable the default behavior of touchpad during the custom gesture, so that I don't accidentally collide ie. with a gesture to switch workspaces?



When I tried libinput debug-events and I got POINTER_MOTION, POINTER_AXIS and GESTURE_PINCH_* events, but without positions of individual fingers. I could definitely use evdev but I don't really want to reinvent the weel.










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    I want to develop a program which would be able to make use of absolute position of fingers on a touchpad to define custom in-app gestures. I've read that using raw data from evdev is a really bad idea as there are many hardware-specific quirks that I'd need to handle and I'd end up rewriting libinput.



    I would like to get events like touch begin, touch end, touch move for individual fingers, each event including absolute position and ideally pressure of the touch.



    So is there a way to get this information from libinput? And possibly temporarily disable the default behavior of touchpad during the custom gesture, so that I don't accidentally collide ie. with a gesture to switch workspaces?



    When I tried libinput debug-events and I got POINTER_MOTION, POINTER_AXIS and GESTURE_PINCH_* events, but without positions of individual fingers. I could definitely use evdev but I don't really want to reinvent the weel.










    share|improve this question









    New contributor




    m93a is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
    Check out our Code of Conduct.























      1












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      1







      I want to develop a program which would be able to make use of absolute position of fingers on a touchpad to define custom in-app gestures. I've read that using raw data from evdev is a really bad idea as there are many hardware-specific quirks that I'd need to handle and I'd end up rewriting libinput.



      I would like to get events like touch begin, touch end, touch move for individual fingers, each event including absolute position and ideally pressure of the touch.



      So is there a way to get this information from libinput? And possibly temporarily disable the default behavior of touchpad during the custom gesture, so that I don't accidentally collide ie. with a gesture to switch workspaces?



      When I tried libinput debug-events and I got POINTER_MOTION, POINTER_AXIS and GESTURE_PINCH_* events, but without positions of individual fingers. I could definitely use evdev but I don't really want to reinvent the weel.










      share|improve this question









      New contributor




      m93a is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
      Check out our Code of Conduct.











      I want to develop a program which would be able to make use of absolute position of fingers on a touchpad to define custom in-app gestures. I've read that using raw data from evdev is a really bad idea as there are many hardware-specific quirks that I'd need to handle and I'd end up rewriting libinput.



      I would like to get events like touch begin, touch end, touch move for individual fingers, each event including absolute position and ideally pressure of the touch.



      So is there a way to get this information from libinput? And possibly temporarily disable the default behavior of touchpad during the custom gesture, so that I don't accidentally collide ie. with a gesture to switch workspaces?



      When I tried libinput debug-events and I got POINTER_MOTION, POINTER_AXIS and GESTURE_PINCH_* events, but without positions of individual fingers. I could definitely use evdev but I don't really want to reinvent the weel.







      touchpad input libinput






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      m93a is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
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      share|improve this question









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      edited 2 days ago







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      asked 2 days ago









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