Firefox

17811 readers

47 users here now

A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Navigation swiping (2-finger) without holding 'alt' in X11? [support][linux][debian] (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I recently installed Debian 12 using Xfce on my SUPER old chromebook to extend its life. Everything has been really nice so far. But I use the chromebook for browsing 90% of the time, so I like to have everything as easily operated as possible, and I am used to being able to navigate forward and back in the browser using two finger swipe gestures.
After some googling, I saw that the support for this just got added in Wayland environments. That implies that it already existed in X11 environments? After a while, I found that if you hold 'alt' you can use the swipe gestures. It defeats the purpose of gestures if you have to use both hands, so I was hoping there was a way to get this functionality back.

(Mozilla Firefox version = 115.6.0esr)

top 5 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

That implies that it already existed in X11 environments?

Not necessarily. Especially in the gestures department, those tend to be Wayland exclusive and is probably why you need to press Alt on X11. I think applications pretty much only get scroll wheel events on X11, while on Wayland they get proper touch events so it's possible to also implement pinch to zoom and the other usual ones.

Both Gnome and KDE only support 3-4 finger gestures on Wayland as well, like 3 fingers up for overview in Gnome just like macOS.

I would expect Wayland to work great on a Chromebook, I'd recommend giving it a try.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I would love to run gnome/wayland, but my Chromebook is about a decade old, and it was a cheapo from the start. It only has 2GB ram, so I’m running as light as I can. Unless there is a way to put wayland on xfce, I might be stuck. I appreciate the reply!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Use libinput-gestures or... Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It looks like libinput-gestures is similar to touchegg/touché in the sense that it only adds support for 3 or 4 finger gestures. It looks like 2 finger gestures are supposed to be supported by your DE or are app specific.

Thanks for the reply!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I suppose, but a three finger swipe still only needs one hand (I think it is the same on macbooks) so should work fine.