Touch and pen gestures

Everything in the pointer adapter is pointer-event based, so a finger or a pen already drags a floating window (its title bar sets touch-action: none) and drags a tiled window or a tab after a still long press. touch adds the gestures a mouse has no equivalent for. It is opt-in: without it nothing below is recognised, and a mouse is never touched by any of it.

attachInput({ root, wm, touch: true });
attachInput({
  root, wm,
  touch: {
    pinch: true,
    swipe: { tabs: true, workspaces: false },
    contextMenu: (press) => openMenu(press),
    contextDelay: 500, slop: 10, swipeDistance: 48, workspaceSwipeDistance: 64,
  },
});

touch: true means pinch, tab swipes and a contextMenu that dispatches a bubbling wm-contextmenu event. Workspace swipes are off by default.

Gesture	Pointers	Result
Pinch	two touches on one floating window	window/resize per move with one shared gesture token (one undo step), honouring constraints
Tab swipe	one touch or pen, a horizontal stroke on a tab strip	window/focus on the next or previous tab, no wrap
Workspace swipe	two touches moving together horizontally	workspace/activate on the next or previous workspace of the stage’s output
Long press	one touch or pen held still on a window	the contextMenu action; the native menu is suppressed

A second finger always ends a single-finger gesture in progress, then starts a pinch or a workspace swipe. The pure math is exported as createPinch, updatePinch and swipeOf.

touch-action

The browser keeps the touch gestures that touch-action allows, so each gesture needs its own rule. The adapter sets data-wm-touch on the root and BASE_CSS maps it: floating windows get touch-action: none (pinch), tab strips pan-y, the stage pan-y (workspace swipes). Without BASE_CSS, set the same rules yourself. The cost is that with pinch a floating window’s own content cannot be panned by touch, and with workspace swipes nothing inside the stage scrolls horizontally by touch.

Under config.direction: "rtl" swipes mirror (see Right-to-left layouts).

Touch is driven with real multi-touch only in Chromium in the end-to-end suite. Full reference: Browser adapters › Touch and pen. Try it in demo/touch.html.