Hello,
I have an old macbook pro 2012. With Apple dropping all support for it, I want to run Linux on it. The caveat is - Im looking for the same feel as the experience with the macbook trackpad and keyboard.
I’ve tried a few different OS’s on it, and each time, it runs as how you would expect. No issues with installation or anything, and most issues have a small or easy fix.
Being used to old habits with that laptop, I haven’t had good luck with remapping things to give it it’s old feel again.
By feel, I mean things like mapping trackpad gestures, some of the “function row” to map the same things as they keyboard has them, remapping some hotkeys to make use of the command button, etc.
I was wondering if there was an OS that has a lot of the things like mouse gestures, or the keyboard mappings of those laptops already built into it.
I’ve got a family member on one running mint.
I’ve run debian and fedora on the late 2013 model. Trackpad gestures used to be handled by libinput-gestures (found on github), and would handle tap double tap and swipe up to 4 fingers - though I think there are some gestures that are just handled by some window managers these days
Edit: added link
Yes, but mostly on Wayland. Both GNOME and KDE Plasma have gestures out of the box on their Wayland sessions.
If you absolutely need Xorg, check out Elementary.
Libinput-gestures is more of a hack and the gestures are simple keypress/command triggers.
Thanks! It looks like libinput-gestures might be one of the missing puzzle pieces I need for making it feel like a mac again!
libinput-gestures IS a game changer.
Please note that if you are using KDE wayland, some defaults are set and cannot be overriden, which is frustrating. You might have to use X11 session instead.
If you really want to use wayland, libinput-gestures will not work with ‘xdotool’ and most of the other gestures reader will be slow. In that case, you might want to use a program called
evemu
. It’s not… intuitive.If you need help on this, don’t hesitate to reply to this message. I’ll gladly help. Not so long ago I was walking in your shoes.
I could use some help with this. Using KDE Wayland and currently almost happy with the gestures that come out of the box (but I think I was able to change 4 finger left/right virtual desktop switch to 3 fingers, don’t remember how I did it…).
One thing I am missing though is being able to map Meta + W (the virtual desktop “collection” screen) to 3 finger swipe up. Any idea how this could be accomplished?
If you use KDE with wayland, then :
To be able to use four fingers swipe up, you need to disable present windows first. Go to settings > workspace behaviour > desktop effects and unclick
desktop grid
andpresent windows
(in the hope that you have no use for them)Then you need to install evemu and libinput-gestures (if you’re on Arch, it’s in the pacman repo and the AUR respectively)
Once you have it installed, run in your terminal
evemu-record
. It will list all of your devices. Shut down the program with Ctrl + C and look at the event for your keyboard. Once this is done note it down.Create a new file
nano sendkey.sh
Copy the content of this code in the new file but replace
EVDEVICE=/dev/input/event4
with your keyboard.#!/bin/bash # sendkey.sh EVDEVICE=/dev/input/event4 for key in $@; do evemu-event $EVDEVICE --type EV_KEY --code KEY_$key --value 1 --sync done # reverse order for key in $@; do evemu-event $EVDEVICE --type EV_KEY --code KEY_$key --value 0 --sync done
Ctrl +O then CTRL + X to save then quit nano. Once it is done run this command :
chmod +x sendkey.sh
then open the gestures app and start mapping away. The interface is very intuitive. What you want to do is click on the little + at the top bar then select the motion you want to bind (in your caseswipe
+up
+4 fingers
) and in the command at the bottom you write/home/YOURUSERNAME/sendkey.sh LEFTMETA W
And there it is. You can map pretty any keybind to any event with this. Hope this helps.
This is so goddamn great that I won’t even make the obligatory vim/nano joke, seriously, thank you a bunch!
Made a little modification to sendkey.sh as the /dev/input/event numbers change on boot:
EVENTNUMBER=$(ls -lah /dev/input/by-path/pci-0000:00:14.0-usbv2-0:5:1.0-event-kbd |awk ‘{sub(“…/”, “”, $11); print $11}’)
EVDEVICE=/dev/input/$EVENTNUMBER