Recommendations for multitouch gestures in Hyprland on NixOS?

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Hyprland has really limited gestures by default, as outlined in the Hyprland Wiki. So I tried using libinput-gestures, which I had some good experience with recently. I used libinput-gestures on Arcolinux running Hyprland and didn’t have any issues.

For libinput-gestures, it doesn’t seem to work on NixOS and there aren’t any additional configuration options on MyNixOS or nixos.org beyond the package install. So I don’t think I’ve configured it incorrectly or anything. On NixOS, when I run libinput-gestures-setup autostart start I get libinput-gestures-setup: command not found.

There looks like there are several options for gestures on linux, in general, such as:

Here are some of the gestures that I had in my libinput-gestures config that I’d like to either reproduce or continue using in NixOS:

gesture swipe up 3 hyprctl dispatch fullscreen 1
gesture swipe down 3 hyprctl dispatch fullscreen 1
gesture swipe up 4 hyprctl dispatch fullscreen 0
gesture swipe down 4 hyprctl dispatch fullscreen 0
gesture pinch clockwise hyprctl dispatch splitratio 0.1
gesture pinch anticlockwise hyprctl dispatch splitratio -0.1
gesture pinch in 4 hyprctl dispatch killactive
gesture pinch out 4 hyprctl dispatch exec kitty
gesture swipe left_up 2 hyprctl dispatch workspace 1
gesture swipe left_down 2 hyprctl dispatch workspace 2
gesture swipe right_up 2 hyprctl dispatch workspace 3
gesture swipe right_down 2 hyprctl dispatch workspace 4

The clockwise and anticlockwise gestures were particularly cool. Does anyone have any experience with gestures in Hyprland on NixOS that they would recommend?

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Yeah, since I wanted to go back to using Hyprland on my laptop this topic is kinda interesting. Hopefully we shall find something out here soon.

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But I was thinking: is the problem that you can’t run libinput-gestures-setup? Or does libinput-gestures not work at all?

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You run libinput-gestures with libinput-gestures-setup followed by either start, stop, and autostart. So to answer your questions - yes :slight_smile:

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So if you have a look at the nixpkgs derivation for libinput-gestures here in line 41:

You will see that libinput-gestures-setup gets removed, and hence, is no longer available.

However libinput-gestures should be available.

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Holy moly, you got it! Looks like you just run it with: libinput-gestures

I’ll have to add that to my hyprland startup script. Thank you!

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Hello @guttermonk. I am struggling to get libinput-gestures work too. Could you walk me through the steps that you took? Specifically

  • What nix configuration did you have? Just adding the libinput-gestures somewhere?
  • How did you set the configuration file?
  • How do you ensure that libinput-gestures is initiallized somehow at start-up time?

Thanks a lot for all the help, if you find the time to share

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Add the following to your configuration file:

  services = {
    xserver.windowManager.fvwm2.gestures = true;
    libinput.enable = true;
  };

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    libinput
    libinput-gestures
    wmctrl
    xdotool
  ];

Then I just point an “exec-once” in my hyprland config to a startup script that executes: libinput-gestures &

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Did you run into a problem where you get Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified?

image

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Did you install the four packages I listed above? You need the two dependencies in that list. Looks like you don’t have wmctrl installed.

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Do you happen to know how to modify this to work under Wayland?

I ask because I currently have the nvidia 555 beta driver running (TL;DR: it adds explicit sync support so that Wayland becomes somewhat usable on nvidia hardware).
The last obstacle to migration I can see ATM is a Wayland replacement for fusuma / xdotool, so that I can keep using multitouch gestures if/when I switch.

Truthfully, seeing as how it’s not 2004 anymore, DE’s like KDE and Gnome as well as WMs should just offer a native MacOS-like (i.e. easy to use) configuration page for this, including mapping random multitouch gestures to random input events.
But until that happens, such 3rd party tools will remain necessary unfortunately.

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I’m using hyprland which runs under wayland, so the instructions above for libinput-gestures should work.

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I am currently running Hyprland version 0.36 (a bit old, due to stability) on NIxOS too. What version of Hyprland are you running @guttermonk ?

I have installed the packes as per your suggestion. I am going to try and pass some of these dependencies via buildInputs and see if that helps me!

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Unforunately, I am still getting the warning that Warning: must install wmctrl to use _internal command. even when I explicitly pass wmctrl to the libinput-gestures package.

I tried adding the

(libinput-gestures.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
	propagatedBuildInputs = oldAttrs.buildInputs ++ [ wmctrl ];
}))