For laptop users, the built-in touchpad can do more magic by enabling multi-touch gestures. And libinput-gestures is a popular solution besides touchegg.

Libinput-gestures is a free open-source utility that reads libinput gestures from your touchpad and maps them to user customized gestures. Each gesture can be configured to activate a keyboard key combination via xdotool utility.

How to Install libinput-gestures in Ubuntu:

1.) Before getting started, you need to add your user to input group to have permission to read the touchpad device. To do so, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

sudo gpasswd -a $USER input

2.) Libinput-gestures replies on xdotool, libinput-tools, and wmctrl. You need to install them by running command:

sudo apt install wmctrl xdotool libinput-tools

3.) Finally download the source tarball, navigate to source folder, and install it by running following commands one by one:

git clone https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures.git

cd libinput-gestures

sudo ./libinput-gestures-setup install

4.) To make the service automatic starts at login, run command:

libinput-gestures-setup autostart start

Because step 1. needs a system restart to apply change, it may outputs failed to add the service to system start. Just ignore it, and restart your machine.

Configure gestures:

The default configurations locates in /etc/libinput-gestures.conf file. You can open terminal and run command to edit it:

sudo gedit /etc/libinput-gestures.conf

Read the description and change it accordingly.

Hate editing config files? There’s a graphical tool to configure touchpad gestures.

Open terminal and you can run following commands one by one to install the tool via flatpak package:

a.) Install the Flatpak daemon via command:

sudo apt install flatpak

b.) Add the Flathub repository which hosts the app package:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

c.) Finally install the graphical tool via command:

flatpak install flathub com.gitlab.cunidev.Gestures

Once installed, open it from system app launcher and enjoy!

Uninstall Libinput Gestures:

To remove the graphical configuration tool, run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data com.gitlab.cunidev.Gestures && flatpak uninstall --unused

To remove the libinput gestures, run command:

sudo libinput-gestures-setup uninstal