How can I use multitouch gestures under LXQt with a touchscreen?

Question

There is no global recognition of touchscreen multi-touch gestures in LXQt. This is unlike in the default Ubuntu Shell desktop environment, where for example a long-press touch event on the touchscreen triggers a right-click.

Multi-touch input events are however provided by the X server, and programs which have their own implementation of multi-touch gestures can be controlled with these gestures. For example, two-finger pinch zoom works in Chrome / Chromium and Evince.

But is there a way to have a global recognition of multi-touch gestures to perform certain configurable actions, such as "trigger right click" or "switch virtual desktop"?

What I tried: I know that the xf86-input-wacom driver has some (limited) gesture recognition including "tap-hold plus tap" for right-clicks. But I had to disable this as otherwise not even left-clicks would work on the touchscreen with some programs (background story).

Answer 1

You can use touchegg.

Installation and configuration

See my other answer.

My experience with touchegg

Sadly, at least with my touchscreen (ThinkPad X201 Tablet), I have found that the more complex gestures like "two-finger pinch" are not recognized reliably enough by touchegg. With a bit of caution, it can be well used for two-finger-tap right-clicking (details). The two-finger-drag gestures are also recognized well, but for me, none beyond these.

Alternatives to touchegg

• There is fusuma, a Ruby based application made for gesture recognition on touchpads. It may also work on touchscreens; I did not try yet. For installation instructions, see this answer.

• There is libinput-gestures, and you can find recommendations for it. In my understanding, this is however specific to the libinput driver, which is used for most touchpads. Touchscreens will usually use the wacom driver instead. But, I did not try this – there might be a way to get it to work.