Emacs touch interface

Emacs touch interface

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Hm.  Did I ask about this before?  I think I may have, but I can't find
it now...

Have anybody made a command set for touch gestures for Emacs?  The only
thing I could find was this old, apparently abandoned project:

https://github.com/dto/emacs-gestures

There's strokes-mode, which is in the same neck of the woods, but is
more of a framework for creating commands from mouse strokes, which is
kinda a bit different.

I think a basic touch screen minor mode would be handy for some newer
laptops.  Like, "pull down" to scroll a page, and "swipe right" to enter
a directory, and...  stuff...

The reason I'm asking is that I'm trying to figure out how to use a
Surface Pro as a music playing machine without having a keyboard.  I've
got an Emacs-based music player, of course, and I can use the on-screen
keyboard for "complicated" things (like searching for a specific
artist), but it seems to me like there should be a common (but
extensible) set of swipe-based commands for Emacs...

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

Re: Emacs touch interface

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> I think a basic touch screen minor mode would be handy for some newer
> laptops. Like, "pull down" to scroll a page, and "swipe right" to enter a
> directory, and... stuff...

Sounds pretty useful, as touch screen laptops become more commonplace.

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Lennart Borgman]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 1:28 AM, John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>>>> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
>
> > I think a basic touch screen minor mode would be handy for some newer
> > laptops. Like, "pull down" to scroll a page, and "swipe right" to enter a
> > directory, and... stuff...
>
> Sounds pretty useful, as touch screen laptops become more commonplace.


Virtual keyboards are sometimes very useful too. But there are some
problems... :-p

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2015 16:28:42 -0800
> 
> >>>>> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> 
> > I think a basic touch screen minor mode would be handy for some newer
> > laptops. Like, "pull down" to scroll a page, and "swipe right" to enter a
> > directory, and... stuff...
> 
> Sounds pretty useful, as touch screen laptops become more commonplace.

Doesn't X produce normal events from touch-screen gestures, like
scroll from pane, etc.?  AFAIK, MS-Windows does that, to allow legacy
applications to react to these gestures.

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Doesn't X produce normal events from touch-screen gestures, like
> scroll from pane, etc.?  AFAIK, MS-Windows does that, to allow legacy
> applications to react to these gestures.

X doesn't seem to when I try on a non-tweaked Ubuntu installation.  I've
googled this a bit, and it seems like it might be possible to have X
deliver other events than the default one.  I'll investigate and see
what I find out...

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> X doesn't seem to when I try on a non-tweaked Ubuntu installation.  I've
> googled this a bit, and it seems like it might be possible to have X
> deliver other events than the default one.  I'll investigate and see
> what I find out...

That is, by default X under Ubuntu doesn't deliver any touch events at
all -- it just emulates a mouse, so a "swipe up" just selects a region
of text.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2015 17:05:29 +0100
> MailScanner-NULL-Check: 1451318731.00822@tRAfIdootzhcGiYHQiEzSg
> 
> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> 
> > X doesn't seem to when I try on a non-tweaked Ubuntu installation.  I've
> > googled this a bit, and it seems like it might be possible to have X
> > deliver other events than the default one.  I'll investigate and see
> > what I find out...
> 
> That is, by default X under Ubuntu doesn't deliver any touch events at
> all -- it just emulates a mouse, so a "swipe up" just selects a region
> of text.

That's exactly what I meant -- emulation.  On MS-Windows, panning
generates horizontal and vertical scroll messages (as if the user used
the scroll bars), zooming generates Ctrl+mouse-wheel, taps generate
mouse clicks, pressing and holding generates a right-click mouse
event, etc.  The only gesture that doesn't get any emulation is
rotation, AFAICT.  See

  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd940543%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

for the details.  I assume X can do something similar, it would be
silly not to.

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Renaud Casenave-Péré]

I would also like to have some kind of touch and maybe a bit more "graphical"
interface to be able to use gnus and org-mode on my phone.

I tried some years ago to make some kind of frontend emacs --daemon using
emacsclient written in qt which was kind of working but was not a great
solution.

-- 
Renaud Casenave-Péré

Re: Emacs touch interface

[joakim]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Hm.  Did I ask about this before?  I think I may have, but I can't find
> it now...
>
> Have anybody made a command set for touch gestures for Emacs?  The only
> thing I could find was this old, apparently abandoned project:
>
> https://github.com/dto/emacs-gestures
>
> There's strokes-mode, which is in the same neck of the woods, but is
> more of a framework for creating commands from mouse strokes, which is
> kinda a bit different.
>
> I think a basic touch screen minor mode would be handy for some newer
> laptops.  Like, "pull down" to scroll a page, and "swipe right" to enter
> a directory, and...  stuff...
>
> The reason I'm asking is that I'm trying to figure out how to use a
> Surface Pro as a music playing machine without having a keyboard.  I've
> got an Emacs-based music player, of course, and I can use the on-screen
> keyboard for "complicated" things (like searching for a specific
> artist), but it seems to me like there should be a common (but
> extensible) set of swipe-based commands for Emacs...

I also have a surface pro running Fedora and Emacs.
I use (grab-and-drag-mode 1) which helps a bit.

A couple of years ago I made a command completion mode when I used Emacs
on the Openmoko phone. It has since bitrotted but the idea was to
present all unique stems of all possible completions. This was
convenient while not having a keyboard.

-- 
Joakim Verona

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Multitouch and gestures on GNU/Linux is a rather painful subject,
apparently.  If you google for it, you get a lot of outdated
information, but apparently the modern way to get access to gestures is
via a library called "geis":

http://people.canonical.com/~stephenwebb/geis-v2-api/using_geis_v1.html

Here's an example program that uses this stuff:

https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg/blob/master/src/touchegg/gestures/collector/GestureCollector.cpp

With geis, you have access to gestures like "three fingered drag to the
left" and "four finger pinch" which you can then map to any action you
like.

  (local-set-key [(pinch three-fingered outwards)] 'report-emacs-bug)

:-)

Getting this stuff into Emacs looks like a bigger project than I had
thought...  and you'd need completely separate implementations on
GNU/Linux, Windows and OS X...

So I'm not going to look into this any further, I think.  The
aforementioned Touchégg program provides an external mapper from
gestures to key strokes, and I'm just going to use that for my one use
case (an Emacs-based music player).

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Anders Lindgren]

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It would be a good idea to define the events that the different gestures
should generate. That way we would reduce the risk that different
implementations would come up with their own set of incompatible event
names.

The only implementation I know of that define gestures is the carbon "mac"
port, maybe we should use its event names as precedence? It uses
`sweep-left/right/up/down', `magnify-up/down', and `rotate-left/right'.

    -- Anders


On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 9:10 PM, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
wrote:

> Multitouch and gestures on GNU/Linux is a rather painful subject,
> apparently.  If you google for it, you get a lot of outdated
> information, but apparently the modern way to get access to gestures is
> via a library called "geis":
>
> http://people.canonical.com/~stephenwebb/geis-v2-api/using_geis_v1.html
>
> Here's an example program that uses this stuff:
>
>
> https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg/blob/master/src/touchegg/gestures/collector/GestureCollector.cpp
>
> With geis, you have access to gestures like "three fingered drag to the
> left" and "four finger pinch" which you can then map to any action you
> like.
>
>   (local-set-key [(pinch three-fingered outwards)] 'report-emacs-bug)
>
> :-)
>
> Getting this stuff into Emacs looks like a bigger project than I had
> thought...  and you'd need completely separate implementations on
> GNU/Linux, Windows and OS X...
>
> So I'm not going to look into this any further, I think.  The
> aforementioned Touchégg program provides an external mapper from
> gestures to key strokes, and I'm just going to use that for my one use
> case (an Emacs-based music player).
>
> --
> (domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
>    bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no
>
>
>
>

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Re: Emacs touch interface

[YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu]

>>>>> On Mon, 4 Jan 2016 21:35:22 +0100, Anders Lindgren <andlind@gmail.com> said:

> It would be a good idea to define the events that the different
> gestures should generate. That way we would reduce the risk that
> different implementations would come up with their own set of
> incompatible event names.

> The only implementation I know of that define gestures is the carbon
> "mac" port, maybe we should use its event names as precedence? It
> uses `sweep-left/right/up/down', `magnify-up/down', and
> `rotate-left/right'.

s/sweep/swipe/

Anyway, as gesture handling seems to be meaningful on GNU/Linux, it
will become yet another feature that cannot be included if the Mac
port goes to the mainline in its restricted form, until this feature
is supported in a free platform.

				     YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu
				mituharu@math.s.chiba-u.ac.jp

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Rasmus]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Multitouch and gestures on GNU/Linux is a rather painful subject,
> apparently.  If you google for it, you get a lot of outdated
> information, but apparently the modern way to get access to gestures is
> via a library called "geis":
>
> http://people.canonical.com/~stephenwebb/geis-v2-api/using_geis_v1.html

Some gestures are built into GTK3/Gnome-Shell, e.g.:

     https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/Gestures.html
     https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Mutter/Gestures
     https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Gestures
     https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.14/touchscreen-gestures.html.en

I don't know if they can easily be used in Emacs...

Rasmus

-- 
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

I spent a day googling and scratching my head, but it seems like the
support for gestures in Linux is pretty weak.  For instance, by default
the Unity interface in Ubuntu doesn't let through any gestures to the
applications, and the ones it does recognise (four-fingered ones) can't
be remapped.

You have to recompile Unity to do anything with the events, and in
addition you have to run a separate daemon to translate events.

So I'm not going to proceed any further down that lane for Emacs.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something basic here, this is all pretty
immature (on GNU systems, at least).

But here's what I ended up with as a touch interface for my Emacs-based
music player:

http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/02/05/touchy-emacs/

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2016-02-05, at 06:34, Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:

> I spent a day googling and scratching my head, but it seems like the
> support for gestures in Linux is pretty weak.  For instance, by default
> the Unity interface in Ubuntu doesn't let through any gestures to the
> applications, and the ones it does recognise (four-fingered ones) can't
> be remapped.
>
> You have to recompile Unity to do anything with the events, and in
> addition you have to run a separate daemon to translate events.
>
> So I'm not going to proceed any further down that lane for Emacs.
> Unless I'm misunderstanding something basic here, this is all pretty
> immature (on GNU systems, at least).

That's a pity.  I'd *love* to be able to use Org proper on, say, an
Android tablet, and e.g. swipe to change the state of TODOs.

> But here's what I ended up with as a touch interface for my Emacs-based
> music player:
>
> http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/02/05/touchy-emacs/

Nice!

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University

Re: Emacs touch interface

[Thorsten Jolitz]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> On 2016-02-05, at 06:34, Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
>
>> I spent a day googling and scratching my head, but it seems like the
>> support for gestures in Linux is pretty weak.  For instance, by default
>> the Unity interface in Ubuntu doesn't let through any gestures to the
>> applications, and the ones it does recognise (four-fingered ones) can't
>> be remapped.
>>
>> You have to recompile Unity to do anything with the events, and in
>> addition you have to run a separate daemon to translate events.
>>
>> So I'm not going to proceed any further down that lane for Emacs.
>> Unless I'm misunderstanding something basic here, this is all pretty
>> immature (on GNU systems, at least).
>
> That's a pity.  I'd *love* to be able to use Org proper on, say, an
> Android tablet, and e.g. swipe to change the state of TODOs.

Maybe this is a handy and pragmatic solution (developed by PicoLisp
Guru Alexander Burger, and in productive use on a Nexus tablet as far
as I know):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_01ha1uS6Y13
,----
| Short demo of the Penti keyboard on Android. Allows chorded input of
| all ASCII - letters, digits, punctuation and control - and
| navigation keys - arrows, page up/down, home, end, function keys
| etc. -, with the five fingers of your right or left hand.
| 
| Available currently for Android version 5.0, and as a Linux kernel

Especially suited for use with Vim or Emacs evil-mode I would say (the
less keystrokes, the better).

Here is an exhaustive list of all key chords, somewhere I've seen a kind
of tutorial too - when there is demand, I search for it:

Akkord DIGIT PUNCT
---------------------------------------------------
01 - ---# N )
02 - --#- I 3 !
03 - --## G 9 =
04 - -#-- E 2 [
05 - -#-# RESET
06 - -##- O 8 |
07 - -### M - >
08 - #--- S 1 *
09 - #--# J : ;
0A - #-#- C , ]
0B - #-## V (
0C - ##-- L 7 _
0D - ##-# RESET
0E - ###- U 0 &
0F - #### K DEL @
10 # ---- SPACE SPACE SPACE
11 # ---# D . /
12 # --#- A 6 `
13 # --## Y ^
14 # -#-- R 5 $
15 # -#-# RESET
16 # -##- B {
17 # -### T ~ %
18 # #--- F 4 ?
19 # #--# H #
1A # #-#- Q '
1B # #-## X \
1C # ##-- Z "
1D # ##-# RESET
1E # ###- P + }
1F # #### W <

Arpeggio
---------------------------------------------------
18 # #--- CNTRL 0C - ##-- BS
14 # -#-- SHIFT 0A - #-#- RET
12 # --#- DIGIT 09 - #--# TAB
11 # ---# PUNCT 06 - -##- ESC

Mnemo
--------------------------------------------------------------------
- #--- S # -#-- R # #--- F # ##-- Z # ###- P
- -#-- E # --#- A - ##-- L - ###- U - #### K
- --#- I # ---# D - -##- O - -### M # #### W
- ---# N - --## G

# -##- B - #-#- C # #-#- Q
# --## Y - #--# J # #--# H
# -### T - #-## V # #-## X

- #--- 1 # #--- 4 - ##-- 7 - ###- 0
- -#-- 2 # -#-- 5 - -##- 8
- --#- 3 # --#- 6 - --## 9

-- 
cheers,
Thorsten