Draggy

Enable three- or four-finger drag on touchpads.

Usage

Draggy will attempt to enable itself on all multitouch devices that can also send a click event (note that for the moment this means drawing tablets may be unsupported). Simply call draggy and it should Just Work™.

You can also pass it the path of the touchpad device to enable gestures on:

draggy -d /dev/input/event14

You can find the path with libinput list-devices (look for the device with the gesture capability, not necessarily the one with Trackpad in its name).

The script enables three-finger drag by default. Four-finger drag is available with the -c or --count option:

draggy -c 4 -d /dev/input/event14

Dependencies

• Python 3
• python-evdev: sudo pip install evdev or install python3-evdev package
• libinput

The script also needs /dev/uinput access. To temporarily enable, run sudo chmod 0666 /dev/uinput. To permanently enable, copy 40-uinput.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d, ensure your user is in the uinput group, and restart your machine. The uinput module is builtin to some kernels, but if yours does not include it you will have to load it with sudo modprobe uinput.

Installation & Removal

The script runs fine in place, but for continued use you may want to set it to auto-start. There a number of ways to do this, below is a suggestion using systemd:

1. Copy draggy and get_gesture_devices.py to /usr/local/bin
2. Copy draggy.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system
3. Test the unit with systemctl start draggy.service
4. Enable the unit to run on boot with systemctl enable draggy.service

Removal consists of reversing the above steps:

1. Disable the unit with systemd disable draggy.service
2. Remove /usr/lib/systemd/system/draggy.service
3. Remove /usr/local/bin/draggy and /usr/local/bin/get_gesture_devices.py

Supported devices

Draggy is tested & frequently used on these devices:

• 2013 MacBook Air
• ThinkPad T580 (Synaptics TM3276-031)
• Wacom Intuos PT S Finger

I don't currently have as much time as I'd like to field support requests, and I have limited hardware to test on. However: please file them anyway in the off chance someone else might be able to help or I come across the same hardware.

If it doesn't work for you...

If there are no errors and draggy still mysteriously doesn't seem to be working, try modifying the value of CLICK_PRESSURE. I haven't found a good way to infer what this should be from the reported device capabilities and at least on the Synaptics touchpad in my ThinkPad, it's... particular.

LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2019-2020 Dave Riedstra. This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.