Swipe bindings

Users create Drag objects to define mouse drag bindings. As Drags are used for interactive actions such as window moving and resizing, they have an initial one-shot command to get/set any initial state, and another command executed upon every movement. This is pretty similar to what swiping bindings require, so fortunately very little additional code was needed outside of the backend for the window manager to handle bindings.

As for the input handling, most of the heavy lifting is done by the wlroots library, specifically its helpers that Qtile uses to set up devices and receive input events, including multi-touch touchpad gestures. Consequently, Qtile's swipe bindings are limited to the Wayland backend, and are not supported under X11.

For X11, existing standalone tools such as libinput-gestures and touchegg can be used for touchpad gestures. They generally work by listening for gesture events on the device and then when an event of interest is made, they run some shell command. This unfortunately means that these tools only support one-shot commands, and not interactive commands. Perhaps it would be possible to create a CFFI wrapper around libinput in Qtile's X backend to support interactive gestures, but I suspect this is non-trivial (reach out if you're is interested in looking into this!).

Example uses

The new Swipe class is pretty much the same as Drag, except it needs a number of fingers rather than a button name. This Drag example is lifted from the default config, and below it is the equivalent Swipe, which is demonstrated in the video.

mouse = [
    ...

    Drag(
        [mod],
        "Button1",
        lazy.window.set_position_floating(),
        start=lazy.window.get_position(),
    ),
    Swipe(
        [mod],
        3,  # 3-finger gesture
        lazy.window.set_position_floating(),
        start=lazy.window.get_position(),
    ),
]

Taking advantage of LazyCall.when(), e.g. lazy.function(zoom).when(focused=Match(wm_class="firefox")) would let you use swipe bindings conditional upon which window is focussed. The X11 tools mentioned above often have this feature, but this addition to Qtile is the only way to get even one-shot gesture-bound actions working in Wayland.

Sliding between groups

The next step was to add commands to interactively and smoothly 'slide' between one group and the next/previous. Fundamentally this mechanism is uncoupled from the gestures mechanism above: if this was added without the ability to have swipe bindings, one could expect to slide between groups using a mouse dragging action via the existing Drag configurable.

Indeed, the current (initial) state of the PR does support this, with bindings for drags and swipes being very similar:

Drag(
    [mod, "shift"],
    "Button1",
    lazy.screen.slide_to_group(),
    start=lazy.screen.start_slide_to_group(scale=2.5),
),
Swipe(
    [],
    4,
    lazy.screen.slide_to_group(),
    start=lazy.screen.start_slide_to_group(scale=2.5),
),

Here is a poor quality video trying to show how it works. Note that at a few points I lifted my hands to end the gesture before moving more than half way towards one of the adjacent workspaces. When that happens, we return to the start. When the gesture ends, whether we're changing to the next/prev workspace or returning to the start, there is a smooth animation transitioning the compositor towards that point:

Neat, huh? This was fun to implement.

What's next?

The possibility for pinch gestures via a new Pinch configurable is low hanging fruit, though I'm unsure what commands users might bind to them. Enabling/disabling fullscreening the current window maybe?

For the workspace animations, these could potentially be one-shot, non-interactive commands too. This would let users bind to a key press "slide smoothly to the next workspace", which would be a new feature for those who don't use trackpads, and indeed some people have already expressed interest in this.