My touchpad often runs out of physical surface when, say, I want to drag’n’drop a file. When my finger reaches the side of the touchpad before the mouse pointer gets to where it should be I have to cancel and start again with more momentum. In Windows when this happens and I don’t lift my finger the mouse pointer continues to travel slowly in the same direction. In case I missed it, is there a setting in KDE Plasma 6 enabling that behaviour?
Another touchpad feature I am missing is the Back (as in browser Back) functionality I get in Windows when I tap the bottom left corner. Is that possible?
That’s on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 with Debian Trixie and KDE Plasma.
EDIT: I just discovered KDE Plasma 6 has a setting called ‘Tap-and-drag lock’. If you lift your finger and quickly reposition you can continue dragging. That’s the most intuitive method, and more elegant than Windows.
Drag until you run out of space, touch second finger further back. Lift first finger and keep dragging with second finger
This moonwalk does work. Thanks!
I found that using pointer acceleration has stopped this situation from occurring much anymore, but still, when I do find myself cornered, moonwalking remains my safety dance :)
Hahah, I did not know that windows does that.
I always use ether the thumb to get the thing I drag further, or I go slowly backwards and fast forward until I reach the destination 🤭
This works but I must say the Windows approach is more elegant and intuitive than moonwalking. I would think its the driver that interprets hitting the boundary in this way.
I was talking about windows 🤭
Pointer Acceleration Profile and Sensitivity should be able to be adjusted to suit your requirements.
True but whatever the settings there will be times you run out of space unless you teach yourself to backtrack and accelerate, or cancel the move and restart. Using multiple fingers or the Windows method deal with that scenario.
In these drag-n-drop situations, I “walk” my fingers back up the trackpad so I can continue dragging.
The settings available in KDE are what you saw, no more no less. The underlying infrastructure however is usually way more powerful than that.
A few laptops ago I had made a pretty nice config for my touchpad enabling way nicer features than I had access to in Windows.
That was using xinput, which I expect won’t work because you’re probably using Wayland. Looks like the replacement is libinput.
As usual, the Arch wiki looks like the place ti start, no matter the distro:
