Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#161

Post by saagarjha » Wed, May 20, 2020, 10:10 PM UTC

aloer wrote: post #148

saagarjha wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done some reverse engineering of the macOS Spaces implementation and it is really all the way through the stack; Dock creates animation transactions and everything in WindowServer to make it work. You really need deep integration to have something like that be smooth and work well.

any chance there is a writeup on this anywhere?

I don't think I have enough for a writeup; I was actually looking into how Dock manages spaces so I have a bunch of general information on the SkyLight/CoreGraphics API. In short Dock grabs trackpad events and creates "SLSTransactions" to animate the windows around, but if there's anything in particular you're curious about I can try to go look that up specifically.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#162

Post by Gracana » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:52 AM UTC

Reelin wrote: post #119

Gracana wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Apple really nailed it with that choice. Not only can you use GUI key combos in the terminal, but also you can use terminal line editing key combos in the GUI. That's something that seems like it ought to be possible in Linux, but afaik it is not.

I can't speak to Windows but at least on Linux that's entirely determined by your desktop environment and terminal emulator. For example, KDE offers near complete configurability of keyboard shortcuts including the ability to specify different sets of active shortcuts based on an application being open or in focus. Taking it even farther, you can use xmodmap (deprecated but simpler) or xkb (full functionality but mor…

Yeah, I've set it up before but there's always a program or two that doesn't pick up the settings. And you still don't get the ctrl- line editing tools in text boxes like you do on Mac OS, so I feel it's more trouble than its worth.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#163

Post by Reelin » Thu, May 21, 2020, 5:56 AM UTC

Gracana wrote: post #162

Reelin wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to Windows but at least on Linux that's entirely determined by your desktop environment and terminal emulator. For example, KDE offers near complete configurability of keyboard shortcuts including the ability to specify different sets of active shortcuts based on an application being open or in focus. Taking it even farther, you can use xmodmap (deprecated but simpler) or xkb (full functionality but mor…

Yeah, I've set it up before but there's always a program or two that doesn't pick up the settings. And you still don't get the ctrl- line editing tools in text boxes like you do on Mac OS, so I feel it's more trouble than its worth.

Luckily I haven't run into that, but then I'm not using any commercial software currently and the stuff in the official repositories tends to work the way you would expect it to. Generally your settings should work pretty much independently of any program you happen to be running - xkb in particular is processing the key events at quite a low level.

Regarding the line editing tools you mentioned that sounds to me like something built in to the native UI toolkit (I'm just guessing here though). Reconfiguring how physical keys are interpreted can obviously only do so much. I'd never heard of those shortcuts before and they sound like a really useful feature.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#164

Post by davidandgoliath » Thu, May 21, 2020, 6:49 AM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #63

edjrage wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually such an aggressive response (from the GP, not you) is precisely the kind of thing I'd expect from someone who has an easy life. I live in pretty crappy conditions, including a crappy computer with crappy touchpad drivers. I just refuse to let such mundane things give me hypertension.

I have an old X1 Carbon that I use at the grunge travel laptop, like throw it in the backpack in a paper bag and go for a hike level of grunge. Its trackpad is junk, phantom movements, zero palm rejection. I coded up some lock scripts so that it locks out the buttons if the cursor is moved. I fantasize about DeepTrack, the AGI that will finally give me trackpad bliss on a Linux desktop.

You might want to give the latest fedora a try, we've got the same model and it's flawless for me.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#165

Post by K0SM0S » Thu, May 21, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

reuben364 wrote: post #146

reuben364 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there are sort of several ideas floating in my head. Keep in mind, these are very loose and I am talking way out of my league here. I said lenses, but the more general term is optics (still vague and unsearchable, I know). A certain representation of optics was popularized in Haskell by Edward Kmett partly as a way to solve the record access problem, but they are way more useful then that. Lenses, in a context of…

Replying because its too late to edit EDIT: I'm struggling to find the source connecting lenses to dynamical systems. I might have misremembered, and was pretty tired, so take that with a grain of salt.

That's a lot to take in, let me get back to you a bit later.

Extremely interesting, I must say at first glance. You're definitely technically stronger than me in most of these topics, I'll have to work on it a bit to clarify some of these concepts.

Thanks for an insightful and candid thinking out loud. Much appreciated. I wish other people would chime in as well to further the discussion, I'm afraid I won't be able to elaborate much technically but rather speak high-level UX concepts. What's interesting is that your general approach seems to answer an essential problem (and opportunity!) in systems whose complexity far exceeds human cognition (that's what I get from the 'lens', not what's on Google about it but the object in your head you call as such; it is sometimes hard to explain such things in a word, rather takes a book chapter).

Thanks again, I'll revisit this WE.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#166

Post by NikolaNovak » Thu, May 21, 2020, 1:12 PM UTC

edjrage wrote: post #71

NikolaNovak wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age? :->

Old enough to be mindful about the health consequences of worrying about the wrong things and not worrying about the right things.

I'm merely asking because the things I could get away in my 20's and things I can get away with in my 40's appear to be wildly different, and I don't seem to be an outlier in this respect :)

(mind you, for me second monitor is about sanity/efficiency, not ergonomics; but a well adjusted chair, keyboard and mouse make a stunning difference to my fingers & wrists these days)

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#167

Post by horsawlarway » Thu, May 21, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #79

horsawlarway wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in exactly the same spot with a (reasonably old 2017 model) Dell XPS. Wayland with libinput has been a JOY to use compared to basically anything I've used in linux before. I tried running an X based DE about 2 years ago on this machine and actually went back to running it in a VM in windows because the touchpad felt so shoddy. No problems at all with the current setup. Can barely tell the different between my wor…

What is the difference between wayland + libinput and X + libinput precisely?

Maybe it's just time and continued development on libinput, but the differences I found are:

Two fingered scroll works by default

Sensitivity/Acceleration curves basically match OSX out of the box

Right click on two finger tap is easily enabled and feels good

Support for multi finger swipe (3/4 fingers) easily enabled and feels good

Palm detection is MILES better (I have huge hands and this is a serious problem)

---

Each of those was a serious issue 3 years ago trying to get things working through xinput (although again, I migrated to wayland about 1.5 years ago and have never looked back so maybe it's better now)

X and xinput give folks a TON of options, and in certain situations that's great. But most of the time (all of the time in my experience) it led to bad defaults and consistently broken settings after upgrades.

I genuinely enjoy the zero configuration approach Wayland has taken here with libinput.

I'm on a mac for work, and while I really disagree with Apple's philosophy, I can't argue that they provide a simple and fantastic touchpad experience. I get that by default on my current setup and it feels nice.

I genuinely enjoy most aspects of system management, but trial and error editing of magic numbers in an xorg conf file for my touchpad just sucked.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

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Post by reuben364 » Thu, May 21, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

reuben364 wrote: post #115

nonbirithm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would Emacs with a typed programming language work with function redefinition? One of the benefits of the environment is I can change code very easily and see the changes quickly. But with types I'm not sure how you'd change the signature of a function and get it to recompile if it's already used elsewhere.

That's one thing I have been thinking about. I think Haskell and other statically typed functional programming languages would benefit from a more interactive REPL like experience for "non-pure" programming where you are sort of changing the wheels on a moving car. This has a very reactive flavor, so I think you could have a sort of functional reactive approach where your hot-swappable definitions are represented as…

I realize now that you were talking about changing types, which I didn't factor in. I guess what would happen is you would cascade the hot swapping, reloading anything which depends on the function for which the type has changed.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

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Post by bchociej » Thu, May 21, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

rurban wrote: post #158

bchociej wrote: post #92

Color me stunned that people are so dissatisfied with their touchpads in Linux. 0-3 lines of options in my config have made me perfectly content with every touchpad I've ever used in Linux.

Care to share? Would be really appreciated

I am away from my laptop for the time being, unfortunately. But it's generally a bit of pointer acceleration and enabling two finger scrolling, if I have to configure anything at all.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#170

Post by floriol » Fri, May 22, 2020, 12:03 PM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #157

wbkang wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually on Windows, 3 line scrolling is a configurable default in the control panel. On X/Linux, on the other hand, is where it's hard-coded to 1 line and there is no way to change it to 3 without having undesired side effects (such as scroll events being fired 3 times).

But no matter what you set it to, an inch of scroll motion on the trackpad results in a different number of screen-inches of window movement, between different apps. In Ubuntu right now: Firefox seems pretty intuitive, one trackpad-height worth of finger movement results in roughly one screen-height worth of window movement. That's great. But LibreOffice Calc, for the same amount of finger movement in the upward dire…

They all use different UI toolkits, some are gtk, some are java UIs, some are electron-based apps. So that's why - it's a higher level problem that is unfortunately inherent to desktop fragmentation which is hard to avoid on linux.