How to get macOS like touch gestures on Ubuntu

If you are a fan of macOS touch gestures then you might be disappointed with Linux distros as most of them don’t offer a default solution for gestures.

Here is how you can enable touch gestures in your system and increase your productivity

TouchEgg

It is a multitouch gesture program, that runs as a user in the background, recognizes gestures, translates them to more conventional types of events, and performs custom actions in response to them

Before Installing touchegg we need to install Flatpak. Though there are a lot of ways to install touchegg, I am going to follow the flatpak versioned touchegg as I found it to be quite reliable

Let’s Install Flatpak

To install Flatpak on Ubuntu 18.10 or later, simply run:

 sudo apt install flatpak

With older Ubuntu versions, the official Flatpak PPA is the recommended way to install Flatpak. To install it, run the following in a terminal:

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flatpak/stable
 sudo apt update
 sudo apt install flatpak

To check version

If you are on some other distro of linux but still like to install flatpak refer

https://flatpak.org/setup/

Install the Software Flatpak plugin

The Flatpak plugin for the Software app makes it possible to install apps without needing the command line. To install, run:

sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak

Note: the Software app is distributed as a Snap since Ubuntu 20.04 and does not support the graphical installation of Flatpak apps. Installing the Flatpak plugin will also install a deb version of Software and result in two Software apps being installed at the same time.

Add the Flathub repository

Flathub is the best place to get Flatpak apps. To enable it, run:

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

Now all you need to do is to restart to apply changes to your system.

Once flatpak is installed you can install apps from flathub https://flathub.org/apps

Or you can use the CLI to download the apps as following

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.github.joseexposito.touche.flatpakref

NOTE: It might take long time to install all the containers.

Once this is down you can find touchegg GUI application in your system 👏.

If you are unable to find it try restarting your system

Now that you have installed touchegg let’s start customizing Gestures.

You can apply gestures to the following platforms

1. Global gestures
2. Google Chrome Browser
3. FireFox Browser
4. Chromium Based Browser

Global gestures are gestures that are applied throughout the system.

As you can see here I have configured my system to maximize a window on 3 fingers swipe up and Show a desktop on 3 finger swipe down.

In Chrome, there are three kinds of gestures available

1. Swipe
2. Pinch
3. Tap

You can set a predefined action, assign a keyboard shortcut, can even set the gesture even to execute a command.

Here I have set 4 finger swipe left to go to the previous tab.

You can customize your gestures in whatever way you want.

Since it supports Firefox, Chrome, and Chromium-based browsers most of the mainstream browsers support the gestures.

Thank you for reading.