Enable touchpad gestures on Ubuntu 18.04

Note: originally I wrote this post as an answer on stackexchange.

Here is the problem: my laptop (Dell XPS-15 9560), has quite a good touchpad which work wonderfully smooth in Windows 10 but when I use Ubuntu (18.04, X.org) there is no out of the box functionality for multi-touch gestures like three fingers slide up.

I have managed to get multi-gestures working on my computer. Kohei Yamada has developed an application called Fusuma to enable multi-touch gestures on Linux. It requires you to install Ruby on your machine if it isn’t already installed.

Follow the instructions from fusuma GitHub’s Readme page or you could follow these steps which worked for me:

First of all check if your current user is part of the input group. You can do that by

sudo gpasswd -a $USER input

Then log out and log back in. Now install xdotool and libinput-tools.

sudo apt-get install libinput-tools  

sudo apt-get install xdotool

If you haven’t installed Ruby you can do that now:

sudo apt install ruby

Now install fusuma

gem install fusuma

Deciding your gestures

This is basically creating a .yml file with the desired configuration. If you want standard gestures you can follow these instructions or feel free to tweak around to get desired gestures.

Go to your config folder in home directory.

cd ~/.config

Now create a folder named fusuma

mkdir fusuma

In there create a file called config.yml

touch config.yml

Now you can use your favourite text editor to enter the contents in this file.

nano config.yml

Copy and paste the following instructions if you are using GNOME, which is the default environment in 18.04.

swipe:
  3: 
    left: 
      command: 'xdotool key alt+Right'
    right: 
      command: 'xdotool key alt+Left'
    up: 
      command: 'xdotool key super'
    down: 
      command: 'xdotool key super'
  4:
    left: 
      command: 'xdotool key ctrl+alt+Down'
    right: 
      command: 'xdotool key ctrl+alt+Up'
    up: 
      command: 'xdotool key ctrl+alt+Down'
    down: 
      command: 'xdotool key ctrl+alt+Up'
pinch:
  in:
    command: 'xdotool key ctrl+plus'
  out:
     command: 'xdotool key ctrl+minus'

threshold:
  swipe: 0.4
  pinch: 0.4

interval:
  swipe: 0.8
  pinch: 0.1

Note that the gestures that this configuration has created for you are the following:

Mult-touch Gesture	Action
3 Fingers - Left	Go Next on Browser
3 Fingers - Right	Go Back on Browser
3 Fingers - Up	Show all Windows
3 Fingers - Down	Close Exposé (Esc)
4 Fingers - Left	Next Desktop
4 Fingers - Right	Previous Desktop
4 Fingers - Up	Next Desktop
4 Fingers - Down	Previous Desktop

After this you can run the command in terminal to test if it has installed

sudo fusuma

nothing will happen in the terminal. Just start using your multi-touch gestures - swipe away on your touchpad.

Now all you have to do is add Fusuma and the command for it in your start-up applications.

Hope this helps.