KDE Tip: Leverage mouse gestures

By Niels on .

KDE has built in support for mouse gestures enabling you to greatly increase your productivity by just drawing thing with your mouse on the screen. You can configure gestures under System Settings, Shortcuts and Gestures, Custom Shortcuts, then check the Gestures checkbox. The gestures you define can execute commands, call D-Bus API calls or emulate key presses.

Example: launching applications

You could for instance draw a plus-sign gesture with your mouse to activate kcalc.

  1. Press ALT+F2, type Custom Shortcuts and hit ENTER.
  2. Click Edit ? New ? Mouse Gesture Action ? Command/URL
  3. Give your gesture a name, and draw it under Trigger.
  4. On the Action tab, write the name of your application.

Example: Calling D-Bus commands through gestures

For example you can switch your desktop from left tot right by drawing a straight line left. With the D-Bus browser you can inspect all the available API's that KDE provides, in this case we use application org.kde.kwin, with object /Kwin and call function org.kde.KWin.nextDesktop on it without any arguments.

  1. Press ALT+F2, type Custom Shortcuts and hit ENTER.
  2. Click Edit ? New ? Mouse Gesture Action ? D-Bus command
  3. Give your gesture a name, and draw it under Trigger.
  4. Now on the Action tab, you can configure the D-Bus command.

Videos

  • Youtube: Mouse Gestures for KDE - Kubuntu 10.10
  • Youtube: KDE mouse gestures (жесты мыши в KDE)

Source

https://userbase.kde.org/System_Settings/Shortcuts_and_Gestures