What's new in XI 2.4 - touchpad gestures

After a nine year hiatus, a new version of the X Input Protocol is out. Credit for the work goes to Povilas Kanapickas, who also implemented support for XI 2.4 in the various pieces of the stack [0]. So let's have a look.

X has had touch events since XI 2.2 (2012) but those were only really useful for direct touch devices (read: touchscreens). There were accommodations for indirect touch devices like touchpads but they were never used. The synaptics driver set the required bits for a while but it was dropped in 2015 because ... it was complicated to make use of and no-one seemed to actually use it anyway. Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved on and touchpad gestures are now prevalent. They've been standard in MacOS for ages, in Windows for almost ages and - with recent GNOME releases - now feature prominently on the Linux desktop as well. They have been part of libinput and the Wayland protocol for years (and even recently gained a new set of "hold" gestures). Meanwhile, X was left behind in the dust or mud, depending on your local climate.

XI 2.4 fixes this, it adds pinch and swipe gestures to the XI2 protocol and makes those available to supporting clients [2]. Notably here is that the interpretation of gestures is left to the driver [1]. The server takes the gestures and does the required state handling but otherwise has no decision into what constitutes a gesture. This is of course no different to e.g. 2-finger scrolling on a touchpad where the server just receives scroll events and passes them on accordingly.

XI 2.4 gesture events are quite similar to touch events in that they are processed as a sequence of begin/update/end with both types having their own event types. So the events you will receive are e.g. XIGesturePinchBegin or XIGestureSwipeUpdate. As with touch events, a client must select for all three (begin/update/end) on a window. Only one gesture can exist at any time, so if you are a multi-tasking octopus prepare to be disappointed.

Because gestures are tied to an indirect-touch device, the location they apply at is wherever the cursor is currently positioned. In that, they work similar to button presses, and passive grabs apply as expected too. So long-term the window manager will likely want a passive grab on the root window for swipe gestures while applications will implement pinch-to-zoom as you'd expect.

In terms of API there are no suprises. libXi 1.8 is the version to implement the new features and there we have a new XIGestureClassInfo returned by XIQueryDevice and of course the two events: XIGesturePinchEvent and XIGestureSwipeEvent. Grabbing is done via e.g. XIGrabSwipeGestureBegin, so for those of you with XI2 experience this will all look familiar. For those of you without - it's probably no longer worth investing time into becoming an XI2 expert.

Overall, it's a nice addition to the protocol and it will help getting the X server slightly closer to Wayland for a widely-used feature. Once GTK, mutter and all the other pieces in the stack are in place, it will just work for any (GTK) application that supports gestures under Wayland already. The same will be true for Qt I expect.

X server 21.1 will be out in a few weeks, xf86-input-libinput 1.2.0 is already out and so are xorgproto 2021.5 and libXi 1.8.

[0] In addition to taking on the Xorg release, so clearly there are no limits here
[1] More specifically: it's done by libinput since neither xf86-input-evdev nor xf86-input-synaptics will ever see gestures being implemented
[2] Hold gestures missed out on the various deadlines