Re: synaptiks – KDE touchpad management

[todd rme]

2010/3/4 Sebastian Wiesner <basti.wiesner at gmx.net>:
> 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)
>

Fair enough.  It was just an idea, I don't know about the implementation.

-Todd