[Feature]: Better way to implement trackpad behavior

[imxade]

Problem Statement

Currently, trackpad gestures are handled by manually implementing each gesture, which is fragile and does not scale well.

Proposed Solution

The goal is to explore alternative approaches for trackpad input handling that allow the system to natively support all gestures available on the host environment, without requiring explicit, gesture-by-gesture implementations.

This should improve reliability, reduce maintenance overhead, and ensure better compatibility across platforms and desktop environments.

Alternatives Considered

No response

Additional Context

No response

Checklist

• I have searched for existing feature requests to avoid duplicates

[aniket866]

@imxade
Please assign

[PinJinx]

@imxade What if we instead of manually detecting gestures in the frontend, the system stream raw multi-touch input data to the host machine and let the operating system handle gesture interpretation natively. like find a way to make it work as a virtual trackpad instead of how it is currently implemented like a virtual mouse. If this sounds like a direction worth exploring, I’d be happy to help.

[imxade]

@imxade What if we instead of manually detecting gestures in the frontend, the system stream raw multi-touch input data to the host machine and let the operating system handle gesture interpretation natively. like find a way to make it work as a virtual trackpad instead of how it is currently implemented like a virtual mouse. If this sounds like a direction worth exploring, I’d be happy to help.

yes I'm expecting something like that

@PinJinx @aniket866 @Nakshatra480 you all can collaborate on this

[pranav-n29]

@imxade kindly assign

[imxade]

@PinJinx and @Nakshatra480, please review #43

Provide any suggestions if needed, and once it meets expectation, just test and confirm.

[Nakshatra480]

Hey @aniket866 , really nice work moving this over to @use-gesture/react. It definitely makes the gesture logic feel a lot more solid.

I had a chance to look through the code and had a few small suggestions to get this ready for production:

• I noticed there are still a few console.logs left in InputHandler.ts (around lines 57 & 65). We should probably clear those out to keep the logs clean.
• The PR description mentions adding try/catch error handling, but I couldn't spot it in the current file. It would be great to double-check that so we don't crash on bad inputs.
• Also, since we're using the library now, do we still need the manual swipe accumulators? It might be worth seeing if we can rely entirely on the library's direction detection to simplify things even further.

Let me know what you think!

[aniket866]

Hey @aniket866 , really nice work moving this over to @use-gesture/react. It definitely makes the gesture logic feel a lot more solid.

I had a chance to look through the code and had a few small suggestions to get this ready for production:

• I noticed there are still a few console.logs left in InputHandler.ts (around lines 57 & 65). We should probably clear those out to keep the logs clean.
• The PR description mentions adding try/catch error handling, but I couldn't spot it in the current file. It would be great to double-check that so we don't crash on bad inputs.
• Also, since we're using the library now, do we still need the manual swipe accumulators? It might be worth seeing if we can rely entirely on the library's direction detection to simplify things even further.

Let me know what you think!

hi @Nakshatra480 thankyou so much for your review , I have made the changes as suggested

[imxade]

I think we should put this on hold until the Wayland cursor issue is resolved.

The use-gesture module appears abandoned since 2024, so it's better to stick with the manual approach for now. We can explore better alternatives later (e.g., virtual input) to let the server handle it natively, as mentioned by @PinJinx.