Touchpad gesture not customizable or cannot turn off all or selected gestures

[Owais Lone]

There is no way to customize or turn off touch gestures. I think we should at least have a way to disable some gestures in case user doesn't want them or wants to override the gestures using some external app like touchegg.

We need a gnome-control-center tab to customize touch gesture actions.

[Owais Lone (loneowais)]

I'm unable to set this to whishlist. Someone please do it for me.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Guill-muller (guill-muller)]

Every time I reinstall Ubuntu, I have to build unity from source as per <url>http://task3.cc/1068/os-x-like-multitouch-gestures-for-macbook-pro-running-ubuntu-12-10/#Disable_Unity_built-in_gestures</url> in order to be able to use touchegg. On a laptop's touchpad, unity's built-in gestures are really inefficient.

I do understand that creating new settings to enable gesture customization would be a lot of work, but would it at least be possible to make it so that the gestures are easily (I'm not even talking GUI, just some file to edit would be fine) disabled ?

Right now, every unity update means taking 30 minutes to compile the whole thing again, unless I disable updates, and thus miss the bug fixes, which is what I actually do. Either way, this is obivously sub-optimal, to say the least, and judging by the number of comments on the blog post I provided, I'm really not the only one annoyed.

[noob saibot (odmartin)]

I am on unity 7.4.0 which is part of the ubuntu 16.04 nightly builds at the moment. I must say that the fact that this situation has still not changed seems to show a bug in the whole development process of unity. Getting to this bug report just cost me more than 2 hours of my time looking for solutions on how to change my touch pad gestures. I am a PhD student in computer science. This means that there are probably thousands of people out there who never even make it this far and get lost in the many many useless wikis and answers on askubuntu etc.

This bug concerns the user interface, this should automatically give it an extra bug heat score of 500. The most successful computer manufacturer and software company (called like a fruit) builds its success exactly on such priorities. Security and privacy are useless if nobody uses your software. To make people use it it needs to be usable.

Sorry for the rant you guys are awesome anyway, but because I like ubuntu and unity so much it hurts more if these things go so wrong and the apple users laugh at me...

there really should be an easy direct way to change the gestures in the touchpad and mouse settings no matter whether this takes a lot of work, it is worth it.

[Heinz (janusbc)]

I perfectly agree with noob saibots post. I am trying to get individual multiple finger gestures on 16.04 for several hours now without success. And this repeats everytime I switch to the new LTS-Version...
 I really like ubuntu but this is a major issue in working experience that lets me think about changing the distro after all...

[Blaine (romeda)]

+1 to oddmartin's comments. I literally just want to turn off gestures as they interfere with gameplay. For someone familiar with XInput / Synaptics stack, this should be a very simple addition / fix. Most people don't have the luxury of being able to learn how to do in-depth X configuration. I can learn it, but would rather spend my time on any one of a million other things.