alt Hacker NewsHere's another thing that's just completely ignored: touchpad as anything other than a mouse replacement. It's possible for a touchpad to allow things like pinch-to-zoom, but nobody's really doing that. You could even use it as a low res painting tablet.
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I guess one problem is that the capability of touchpads really varies. Not all of them support recognizing multiple touch points for example.
And the original UX issue is much easier solved by bringing a mouse with your laptop.
Well, Apple is doing it. The touchpad experience on macbooks is really on another level than all other laptops and one of the main reasons that's keeping me there.
Pinch-to-zoom is handled by libinput, and exposed to gtk apps. Works fine in firefox. Works in GtkWebkit views. works in Loupe the image viewer. works in Gnome Maps. Even works in Emacs, ffs.
Are you on X or smth?
Pinch to zoom and two finger scrolling work well for me in most Windows apps. Apple has a few touchoad gestures that I don't believe have equivalents elsewhere, but they would be pretty neat.
The main issue with going beyond the mouse is that it involves changes across the event handling stack. For track pads, you have to build multi-touch infrastructure up ro a point and then there is a decision: what are gestures that are handled at a desktop level? What are gestures that get converted into semantically similar events (e.g. tap->LMB click)? What gets passed through as multi-touch? This ends up touching a lot of parts of the desktop software stack and the amount of required buy in to get this done on Linux seems massive.