Easystroke doesn't detect movement from any device

[Mike Hartman]

Binary package hint: easystroke

Running a fresh install of Natty on a ThinkPad X220 tablet. I've tried creating gestures with the touchpad, trackpoint, touch screen and pen. All are valid, active input devices that work fine for standard mouse control and show up as active and checked under easystroke's Advanced tab. In every case the "Record Stroke" operation detects any clicks or button presses I make but misses the motion completely. So the gesture is always saved as a simple click operation, they're all the same, and the first one always triggers no matter what gesture I try to make.

This install is only days old and everything has been updated, so I'm running the most recent easystroke, xserver, etc.

Ubuntu version: 11.04

easystroke version: 0.5.4-0

What I expected to happen: Gestures to record

What happened instead: They didn't...

[teixeiras (teixeiras)]

Exacly same except with acer 1825p hid-cando

[Tom Jaeger (thjaeger)]

I got my X220t yesterday, but I can't reproduce this problem. Can you attach the output of "easystroke -vvvvv" when you're trying to record the gesture.

[Mike Hartman (ubuntu-hartmanipulation)]

Attaching two versions, one with instant gesture and one with click and hold. These are both done with the touch screen and button 1, since those are the gestures I'm most worried about getting working. (Single finger swipe to scroll / flip pages, that kind of thing.)

They're both showing motion events, so I'm not sure why they're not being recorded as part of the action.

When I try to record it with "instant gesture" it seems to accept and complete the recording, but it shows the recorded gesture as just "Button 1". When I try to record it with "click and hold" it lets me swipe my finger around the screen as much as I want, but never seems to start or stop the recording, so I eventually have to just cancel.

I'm pretty sure I saw this same behavior when trying to use the touchpad with the same settings, so I don't think it's anything unique to the touchscreen. I'll try the touchpad again with vvvvv in a minute and post that output too.

[Mike Hartman (ubuntu-hartmanipulation)]

Pretty much the same behavior with the touchpad. "Instant stroke" is identical. "Click and hold" lets me complete the gesture recording this time, but then warns me that I bound the gesture to just a single button click, and asks if I'm sure. It doesn't seem to have the problem terminating the recording that the touchscreen does though.

[Mike Hartman (ubuntu-hartmanipulation)]

I should add that by default the touchscreen and stylus weren't being recognized by the wacom driver and thus weren't behaving properly. I had to upgrade to the newest version of xserver-xorg-input-wacom (not in the standard repositories) and fiddle with xorg.conf.d/50-wacom.conf to get it to pick them up. I don't believe that's a factor because I reported this bug before I made all those changes and the bug is still present on my system. Just thought I'd mention it in case you saw something in the above output that didn't match your stock install and got confused.

[ mike@Flip /home/mike 19:08:51 ] xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ ISD-V4 Finger touch id=13 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ ISD-V4 Pen stylus id=14 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ ISD-V4 Pen eraser id=15 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint id=16 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Integrated Camera id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ ThinkPad Extra Buttons id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]

[ mike@Flip /home/mike 19:08:56 ] xsetwacom --list devices
ISD-V4 Finger touch id: 13 type: TOUCH
ISD-V4 Pen stylus id: 14 type: STYLUS
ISD-V4 Pen eraser id: 15 type: ERASER

[Tom Jaeger (thjaeger)]

Thanks for the debugging output. Everything seems to be working as intended in those examples (although I admittedly did a horrible job of documenting how things are supposed to work). Instant Gestures trigger the moment the button is pressed. This is primarily for mice that have lots of buttons and allows to either bind an action to the button or several actions to the combination of the trigger button and any other button. I use it to enable scrolling using the side switch on the wacom pen. Click-and-hold gestures trigger when the user clicks and then holds the button for a certain duration without moving the mouse. This is the only possible gesture in this case. The warning message in this case is bogus.
The normal behavior is to have the radio buttons set to "Timeout" -- I have no clue why I chose such a misleading term for this though.

[Mike Hartman (ubuntu-hartmanipulation)]

Thanks for the info. So "instant gestures" and "click and hold" both deal only with the button, and actual gestures need to use "timeout". That does seem to work correctly with my touchscreen.

I should have been more observant. When you mentioned "documenting" above I started looking around, because there's no "Help" or "Documentation" link in the GUI. Sure enough, there's a man page, which I hadn't thought to check for a program that's basically all-GUI. Not much detail in the man page, but it does contain a link to the wiki. So for future googlers / careless folk like myself:

 http://easystroke.wiki.sourceforge.net/Documentation#content

While I've got you, is there a smoother way to implement a scroll gesture on a touchscreen than a standard "scroll" action? When I create one of those, I have to make the gesture, and then pause for a second / lift my finger so it will recognize the gesture, and then scroll up or down as a separate motion. What I'd prefer is to just drag my finger up and down with a single gesture and have the page move with it. Android does this, and the wacom driver has something like this built-in, but the wacom version is a little picky about the finger gesture involved and doesn't let you adjust the scroll speed the way easystroke seems to let you do.

I found this in the "Tips and Tricks" section of the wiki:

"If you don't have a scroll wheel, you can make easystroke emulate one by pressing a button and moving the cursor. Add the button as an additional button of type "instant gestures" as above, and record a new gesture by clicking the button, then change the action's type to "Scroll"."

The trouble is, this still seems to act like "gesture -> enter scroll mode -> do scrolling" when what I'm after is "gesture = immediately start scrolling". The scroll mode itself is exactly what I want, I just need a way to jump straight into it without that stuttering action.

Thanks again for the help!