twofing – Two-finger gesture support in Linux

twofing is a daemon which runs in the background and recognizes two-finger gestures performed on a touchscreen and converts them into mouse and keyboard events. This way, such gestures can be used in almost all existing applications (even ones where you wouldn’t expect it, like Wine applications) without having to modify them.

twofing is only an intermediate step which is necessary until proper multitouch support along the whole software stack of a typical Linux-based system is available. It reads raw multitouch events from the kernel, bypassing X, and has to do some dirty things like grabbing the input device so the multi-touch actions are not passed to the applications as normal mouse events. It can hopefully be replaced one day by a proper multitouch framework (like uTouch promises to become). But for now, it works reliably, is surprisingly stable and provides some advanced features, like kinetic scrolling.

twofing currently only works with the eGalax touchscreen of the Eee PC T101MT. How easy it would be to adapt it to other devices depends on the device; for many, simply altering the udev rule should be enough. As I don’t have any other hardware to test it, I can’t currently do anything about that. If you want to make it work with a different device, you can send me a message.

Currently, there is no source code repository or project site: All development, testing and feedback takes place in a thread in the ubuntu forums. All download, compiling and usage instructions can be found in this post. To download it, you have to create an account in the forum. It’s intentional that I don’t provide another download link, as this shall encourage you to share your experiences with the daemon and ideas for further development in the forum thread.