Gestures in Graz, and beyond

Sunday, 3 May 2026  |  Jakob Petsovits

KDE's Mega Sprint 2026 in Graz brought a group of about 20 KDE contributors together in early April, to discuss technical challenges, make decisions, and get stuff done. With travel support from KDE e.V. (thanks to your donations), I was able to join the group there.

Other blogs have reported on their experiences of what happened in Graz: Kieryn Darkwater, Albert Astals Cid, Kristen McWilliam, Volker Krause, and Raresh Rus. A large variety of topics were on the agenda, people were wearing multiple hats to help each other out.

I, on the other hand, went to Graz with one sole purpose: figure out the best way to merge gesture customization.

Dude, what's taking you so long

Quick recap. Since NLnet approved a grant last year, we've published requirements, designed settings UIs, proposed config file formats, ported my earlier mouse gesture prototype to KWin, and presented at Akademy 2025. Then I got injured for a while, hit a slump through the fall and winter, and didn't make much progress until more recently.

Meanwhile, as an actual Plasma user, you have benefited from exactly none of this prep work. For example, a representative sentiment from the comment section of Brodie Robertson's recent Plasma 6.7 upcoming features video:

Yet again it looks like configurable touchpad gestures have slipped....

To be fair, we haven't actually promised any particular Plasma release for this to land in. But I get it. It's been weighing on me probably harder than it's been weighing on you. So I finally emerged from the slump with a set of experimental patches that allowed real-time ("one to one") gestures like Overview to be reassigned to a different gesture via config file options.

Quick architectural primer

There are several KDE components that work together to handle keyboard shortcuts:

KGlobalAccel: This KDE Framework is used by an app or desktop component to register actions and their preferred global shortcuts. KGlobalAccel doesn't actually do much by itself, it just sends requests to a background service (via D-Bus) and tells the app what shortcut actually got assigned for each action. Then it just waits for a signal from the background service that the shortcut was pressed and the action should be performed.

KGlobalAccelD: This is the background service! Part of any Plasma desktop. It listens for global shortcut requests from apps, looks for additional shortcuts in *.desktop files, and reads from and writes to ~/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc to manage shortcut assignments. It can check if a given key combination will trigger a registered action. If it does, it tells the corresponding app to perform the action. On Wayland, KGlobalAccelD is embedded into KWin, giving KWin access to functionality that isn't available over D-Bus.

KWin: Plasma's compositor which we all know and love. It manages windows and puts their contents on screen, but it also has exclusive access to libinput on Wayland. So any key presses, mouse clicks, touch taps, and pointer movement will go through KWin. Most of these just get relayed to the current app. But some of them are intercepted. For global shortcuts, KWin asks its KGlobalAccelD service to check if it should eat up the shortcut and fire a global shortcut instead of sending it to the currently focused app.

System Settings / "Shortcuts" page: An independent app that asks the KGlobalAccelD service for all components with registered shortcut actions. If the user changes a shortcut assignment, it tells the KGlobalAccelD service about it. As a result, KGlobalAccelD notifies the app that its shortcut has changed.

XDG Desktop Portal KDE: Only tangentially involved. It implements the Global Shortcuts portal, so that any app can register global shortcuts, even if they aren't using KDE Frameworks. All it does is to translate an app's portal requests to requests for KGlobalAccelD.

The consensus is that gestures are much like keyboard shortcuts, so gesture configuration should be implemented in similar ways, using the same components. There are important differences of course. How to deal with those isn't quite trivial. That's where sprint discussions come in.

Back to Graz

Having a functional prototype is a good start, but it's still a couple of steps removed from getting it merged into Plasma. I arrived with a number of technical questions to hash out the exact plan and get agreement. All the minutious details can be found in the sprint notes wiki page, but the short version is that the implementation plans became very clear. There were three breakthroughs in particular:

  • We don't need to expose gesture details through KGlobalAccel: System Settings can link against KGlobalAccelD directly, so we can put the new trigger class in there without worrying about backwards compatiblility for apps.
  • Natalie, Nate, Kristen and I sat down for a long UX design session, improving on our previous UX proposal together.
  • Nicolas Fella provided wise advice on config syntax, leading to a better trade-off between readability, clean code, and migration concerns.

Xaver Hugl deserves a special mention, he was generous with all the other technical questions that I kept pestering him about.

Of course I also got involved in a few other discussions, as well as daily dinner outings. It's a good group. But you've read about this on other blogs already, so I won't bore you except with a few more pictures.

Proof I was there Proof I was there
I bought an amigurumi Konqi I bought an amigurumi Konqi
One of many food outings One of many food outings
Walking to a rustic restaurant on a hill Walking to a rustic restaurant on a hill
Snackies Snackies
Konqi at Linuxtage Graz Konqi at Linuxtage Graz

I spent the remainder of April improving my previous patches. The result is a series of MRs that are finally ready for code review by KWin and KF6 maintainers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). This will allow assigning touchpad and touchscreen gestures for global actions by editing the kglobalshortcutsrc config file. Schedules were tight, so this didn't make the cut for Plasma 6.7 anymore. Let's see if we can get it into 6.8 though.

Based on this work, my work-in-progress changes to support mouse gestures stroke gestures line shape gestures have been improved as well (1, 2). Autotests and more code polish are needed before this can go into code review, but it's now quite functional: path simplification, shape recognition, action configuration, and a neat little visualization effect are all in place.

Other recent input highlights

Plasma Keyboard was also heavily discussed in Graz, spearheaded by Kristen who put some serious polishing work into it. Kristen introduced a long-press diacritic selection pop-up for Plasma 6.7, a killer feature in my opinion. Meanwhile, on a different continent, Devin Lin has been hard at work to prepare an architectural overhaul of Plasma Keyboard, which would facilitate much-requested improvements to the on-screen keyboard experience (this won't make it into 6.7 though).

Quinten Kock's changes to make touchpad pinch zoom gestures work in Okular are now available with the recent KDE Gear 26.04 release. This bug was pointed out in the discussion on our Input Goal proposal, all the way back in 2024, so it's great to see it fixed. If you're a developer, have a look at the commit and use QNativeGesture events to support touchpad pinch. Shout-out also to Taufeeque Sifat, who's been improving Okular's text selection behavior including triple-click line selection.

Kai Uwe Broulik modernized the code for mouse and touchpad settings pages. This is not a user-visible change, but future changes to these settings become easier thanks to Kai Uwe's work. I'm excited because it paves the way to a unified Mouse & Touchpad settings page in future releases. Alexander Wilms tweaked System Settings to hide Mouse, Touchpad, and Game Controller settings pages when no such devices are connected. Also notable is work on a custom pointer acceleration curve editor, which is not ready to ship yet but hopefully can get there eventually.

Joshua Goins added an option for the stylus cursor to stay in sync with the mouse pointer. David Redondo fixed the stylus button assignment lines looking weird in the Drawing Tablet page in System Settings.

Vlad Zahorodnii added support for libinput plugins to KWin, allowing technical users to work around otherwise unfixable input hardware quirks. Xuetian Weng and Nicolas Fella improved the behavior of key repeats for input methods and screen readers. David Edmundson fixed an issue with pointer positions for mirrored touchscreen displays.

Thanks to everyone who has worked on KDE's Input Goal in the past! At this year's Akademy in Graz, we should see a new set of goals elected, so we're in the final stretch for this one.

Onward to Germany

I wrote this blog post while riding a long-distance train, on the way to another gesture customization mini-sprint with Natalie. The plan is to focus on implementing the new settings pages that will let regular users reassign (or unassign) gestures. Thanks again to KDE e.V. for travel support for another week of in-person collaboration. Let's see how much stuff we can get squared away - it's not just settings forms, but more infrastructure on the KWin and KGlobalAccelD side is also still needed to make everything fit together.

There will be another blog post to follow up on this later. Until then!