Unity: should have a setting to disable 3- and 4-finger tap gestures (touchscreen)

[Daniel Manrique]

Currently, Unity "hijacks" the 3-finger and 4-finger tap gestures (3-finger enables multitouch grab handles; 4-finger shows the dash). So any applications that want to act on those gestures don't even receive them.

Discussing this with the Unity team, they said it would be feasible to add a user-accessible toggle to disable Unity's handling of these gestures so they are "passed on" to applications. They asked me to file a bug requesting this feature, so here it is.

My use case is a Qt/QML application that should react to 3- and 4-finger taps but currently doesn't get the events due to Unity's handling of them. The way I get this to work currently is by disabling Unity altogether (using compizconfig to disable the unityshell plugin), which is a horrendous hack.

I did find a few bugs that might be related, or be the same feature expressed differently, here they are in case triagers decide to mark some as duplicates.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/842693
Touchpad gesture not customizable or cannot turn off all or selected gestures

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/900755
Touch: System settings needs a pane to customize touch gestures

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/898853
Touch: Unity hijacks multitouch gestures

The last one was marked Won't Fix with this rationale: https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/898853/comments/7.

Thanks!

[Andrea Azzarone (azzar1)]

Fixed in 16.04

[Frederick Eyland (freeyland)]

Hi, issue is available in latest ubuntu release. WHen in Chromium, the multitouch is still active.