← Otto User GuideTouchpad Gestures

Otto’s gestures are driven by libinput and work on any multi-touch touchpad. They are not configurable yet — the mappings below are fixed.

Three-finger swipe

A three-finger swipe does one of two things, decided by direction:

Otto does not commit to either the moment you touch down. It accumulates the movement and waits until you have travelled about 20 pixels in one direction, then picks whichever axis has moved further. This means a slightly diagonal swipe still does what you meant, and small stray movements never trigger anything.

Once the direction is decided, it holds for the rest of the gesture — you cannot turn a workspace swipe into an exposé by changing direction mid-way.

Workspace switching

The workspaces track your fingers continuously: the whole desktop slides horizontally as you move, so you can see the next workspace coming and back out by reversing.

When you lift your fingers, Otto snaps to the nearest workspace using the velocity of the last part of the gesture, not just the final position. A quick flick carries you to the next workspace even if you barely moved; a slow drag that stops short springs back.

Swiping past the first or last workspace has no wraparound.

Exposé

Swiping up opens the exposé grid; the windows scale down and spread out in step with your fingers, so you can peek at the grid and abandon it by swiping back down. Lifting your fingers snaps open or closed based on how far you got, with a spring animation carrying the momentum.

Swiping down from the open state closes it again.

While exposé is up, the workspace selector strip appears above the grid, and the dock hides.

Four-finger pinch

Like the swipes, this tracks your fingers rather than firing at a threshold, so you can pinch part-way to peek at the desktop and release to snap back.

The four-finger pinch is ignored while a three-finger swipe is in progress, and while exposé is open — the two modes do not stack.

Two-finger scroll

Two-finger scrolling is ordinary scroll input forwarded to whatever is under the pointer. Natural (reversed) scrolling is on by default and configurable, as are speed and acceleration — see Input.

Tap and click

Tap-to-click is on by default:

Physical clicks use the clickfinger method by default — the same mapping, using how many fingers rest on the pad rather than where you click. Switch to buttonareas (bottom-right corner = right click) in the config if you prefer.

Tap-and-drag is enabled; drag lock is not. Otto also disables the touchpad while you type by default. All of this is configurable — see Input.

Keyboard equivalents

Every gesture has a keyboard action, so gestures are never the only route:

See Keyboard Shortcuts.

Touchscreen

Touch input is supported for ordinary interaction — tap, drag, and window move/resize requests from clients. The gestures above are touchpad-only.

Troubleshooting

Gestures do nothing. Confirm libinput sees your touchpad as a multi-touch device: libinput list-devices should report gesture support. Gestures do not work on the --winit backend, where the host compositor consumes them.

Swipes feel over- or under-sensitive. The 20-pixel direction threshold and the momentum model are not configurable yet. scroll_speed and pointer_accel_speed in [input] affect scrolling and pointer motion, not gestures.

A swipe switched workspaces when I meant exposé. Start the swipe with a more deliberate vertical movement — the axis with the larger accumulated delta at the 20-pixel mark wins.