Trigger at the begin

[guiodic]

It is most likely a limitation of mine, but I cannot see if it is possible to have actions triggered at the beginning of the gesture or even better while they are happening.

[bulletmark]

A gesture doesn't exist until you have swiped your fingers in a direction so clearly they can not be action-ed "at the beginning". Also, you can start moving in a direction and then change direction and/or final location (or even cancel the gesture) and this tool merely looks at the start and end locations to define the swipe and then do the action. Ultimately, libinput produces single GESTURE_BEGIN and GESTURE_END events and this tool actions on that end event.

[guiodic]

OK, I understand, what could be useful is to make it configurable when to trigger the action whether with the GESTURE_BEGIN event or with GESTURE_END one (which would remain the default)

[bulletmark]

As I said above, how do you expect to trigger on GESTURE_BEGIN when at that point you don't even know which of the 8 possible gesture directions will happen? Also, that gesture may get cancelled by the user.

[guiodic]

ok, I read the documentation and found the
LIBINPUT_EVENT_GESTURE_SWIPE_UPDATE
event.

For example, it could trigger the action after a certain (configurable) number of updates or a certain number of milliseconds.

Don't take this as a criticism of your choice, I have been using libinput-gestures profitably for quite a while. It's just a suggestion to give it one more options.

[bulletmark]

There is one START event, very many UPDATE events, then one END event (potentially with an attached CANCEL flag). The problem is that the user may move their fingers all over the place so you only know the direction once the user has settled on a final position at the END point, or libinput can even decide, based on user movement, that the gesture should be cancelled. libinput-gestures also applies a minimum threshold movement so that tiny/spurious gestures are ignored. This is all fundamental to how it is implemented so not planing to change it sorry.

[guiodic]

OK, thanks anyway!

[bulletmark]

@guiodic note I moved this from an issue to a discussion at the very start so no need to close it. I'd prefer to keep it open so others can find it if they visit here.