fukomaster

Simulate a trackpad with your physical mouse.

demo.mp4

Using fukomaster with an MX Master 3S on GNOME with the PaperWM tiling WM extension

Motivation

Mice like the MX Master 3S have a dedicated gesture button which can be used to activate desktop actions. On Windows, this allows you to do useful functions like switch between workspaces with a flick of the mouse. However, Linux has much worse support for these gestures.

Tools like Solaar allow you to assign actions to the gesture button using rules, which you can use to switch workspaces. For example, a rule like "on mouse gesture right -> press keybind Super+Right" will press the Super+Right keybind when you perform a right swipe, and if your WM is configured to interpret Super+Right as "switch to the next workspace", this will change the workspace.

However, WMs like KDE's kwin and GNOME's mutter have an even nicer tool for switching workspaces in this gesture manner: the three-finger swipe on the trackpad. If you press down on a trackpad with three fingers and start swiping left/right, the desktop will swipe smoothly in the direction that you swipe - that is, it's not an abrupt change like a keybinding, but a gradual process. The more you swipe, or the faster you swipe, the further the desktop moves to the next workspace.

fukomaster allows you to simulate this behavior by temporarily turning your mouse into a trackpad; starting a three-finger swipe (or however many you have configured); then converting your mouse movements into finger movements on the virtual trackpad.

Note that this doesn't just work with switching workspaces - you can use trackpad gestures for all kinds of things, such as swiping right to go back in a web browser. You are, however, limited to the fact that all of your virtual fingers will be moving in the same direction at the same speed, so you can't, for example, simulate a pinch-and-zoom.

Usage

Tested on:

• Wayland
  • GNOME 46
• Xorg
  • TODO

This tool must be run as root, since it needs to read raw mouse inputs from your physical mouse.

If using Solaar, the Key/Button Diversion for the Mouse Gesture Button must be set to Regular, so that this tool can read the mouse gesture button being pressed/released.

This tool uses evdev's grab functionality, which allows a process to temporarily lock a device's inputs so that only that process can consume them, and other processes do not read the events. This may cause some issues with other processes which also grab!

This tool is very customizable - see the --help for all the command line flags.

Packages

TODO - probably need to package this as a systemd service. Could upload to AUR?

Compile from source

cargo build
sudo target/debug/fukomaster

To enable logging, use sudo -E to pass in the RUST_LOG env var:

RUST_LOG=trace sudo -E target/debug/fukomaster

Etymology

• master: because I wrote it for my MX Master 3S
• fuko: ヒトデです！