What's new in Synaptics 1.6.0

xf86-input-synaptics 1.6.0 was released today and it packs a bunch of changes. This post outlines some of these changes and future directions for the drive.

Clickpad support

Clickpads are touchpads without physical buttons. Instead, the user has to press the whole pad down to trigger a click. These pads are becoming increasingly common in laptops but need a bunch of software workarounds to make them useful with traditional interaction methods. I've got a post dedicated to Clickpad support in the synaptics driver, so best to read that for more details.

The important bit about clickpad support is that it's only available on multi-touch capable X servers. If you're running an older server, you won't see clickpad-y goodness. Sorry.

Smooth scrolling

Smooth scrolling is now supported by the driver as well. On XI 2.1-compatible servers (read: server 1.12 [1]), the driver will submit scrolling valuators instead of scroll events. This makes for a smoother scrolling experience on clients that support it.

We're in a transition period where clients start to enable smooth scrolling but many other clients don't support it yet. For now, we left coasting enabled by default in the driver to provide a consistent experience. This will likely be disabled once smooth scrolling support and client-side coasting becomes more prevalent.

Meanwhile, clients can disable it by setting the "Synaptics Coasting Speed" property to 0, 0.

Bugs, bugs, bugs

Luckily I was able to spend quite some time on synaptics over the last weeks to fix various bugs and I think this is the most solid release of synaptics in quite a while. A few bugs that you may have seen that have now been fixed are:

• touchpad unresponsive after suspend  #49161
• weird cursor jumps while dragging #48777
• broken double-tap #31854
• slow or too fast scrolling on pre-1.12 servers #46617

and a few more.

Future of synaptics

What becomes more and more obvious is that the driver is on the edge of being unmaintainable. Pushing new features into the driver always always means that some other feature is broken and sometimes we don't notice for months. Having around 75 options in the driver doesn't help here, testing all combinations is impossible.

I can't claim that I have big plans because I tend to get pre-empted by misc things all the time but the rough plan is to keep a 1.6.x series while re-doing some of the internals of the driver for the 1.7 release. Expect the git master branch to see a few big changes though.


[1] Ubuntu 12.04 ships a 1.11 with the 1.12 input stack, so the above applies to that server too.