synaptiks – KDE touchpad management

[Sebastian Wiesner]

On Thursday 04 March 2010 16:59:00 todd rme wrote
> Some more in-depth idea:
> Graphical display showing the configuration results.  You would have a
> rectangle, probably gray, representing the touchpad (an oval for
> circular touchpads).  A red dot or crosshair would show the current
> position of your finger on the touchpad.  If you trigger an edge
> detection event, a red arrow would appear just outside that edge
> showing the edge motion direction.  If you trigger circular scrolling,
> a red circle with an arrow showing the scrolling direction would
> appear.  There would be boxes in the four corners that would change
> color if you do a corner tap, and as now, a display showing how many
> fingers are currently be pressed and which mouse buttons have been
> triggered.
> 
> Auto-detect edge location.  So for instance you can push a button that
> says "detect left edge", it will tell you to tap the left edge of the
> touchpad, and then it will store that value as the new left edge
> location.  You would be able to do this for all edges.

The idea is nice, but difficult to implement, if possible at all.

An implementation would require a way to constantly monitor the *physical* 
coordinates of all events generated by the touchpad, just like "synclient -m".  
Now, the implementation  of "synclient -m" is based on shared memory, which is 
a no-go.  An alternative implementation based on the XInput-API would be 
required, and I don't think that the XInput-API exposes such functionality.

And even if this functionality was available, implementation wouldn't be easy.  
Knowledge about driver internals would be required to implement this 
correctly.  For instance, to display an arrow, when circular scrolling is 
active, synaptiks would need to know how exactly circular scrolling is 
implemented in the driver.  This makes the implementation rather ugly …

If synaptiks is "complete" concerning touchpad configuration features, I'll be 
looking into this, but this isn't something that can be done now or any time 
soon.

-- 
Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.
                                      (Rosa Luxemburg)
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