When was the last time you were wow-ed out by your computer? Well? I can practically hear your brains whiz in search for memories of such a moment. Fear not, at the end of the post (supposing you read all of it, of course), you would have at least ONE such moment! I would bet on it, were I a betting man.
Now that you’re hooked, I need to tell you that if you don’t use a Linux-based OS, fog off! This ain’t meant for ya! And for those who do, stay on.
I’ll be stepping you through a few steps to turn your finger into a magic-wand. Quite literally. I use Ubuntu 11.10, so these steps apply to it in particular, but it may work on other flavours as well (Comments please!).
Okay, before I start, I want to show you what I’m talking about. Here’s a link to the video (I wasn’t able to embed videos; wordpress requires some payment for that).
How cool is that, eh? Want it? Then read on!
Okay, all that desktop-magic is conjured by an amazing app called ‘Easystroke Gesture Recognition’. It basically recognizes actions you do on your touchpad, with your mouse or, if you’re lucky enough, with your touchscreen monitor! Each gesture is linked to a command, keystroke, or special action; and you could do like a zillion different gestures that do a zillion different things!
Step 1:
Install easystroke. For those ‘terminally-impaired’, open up the Software Center and type ‘easystroke’ in the search box, and the first thing that pops on in the results is the one you want. Follow the link through and click on ‘Install’ to install it.
Alternatively, for those who prefer the terminal way of doing things, all you need is this command:
sudo apt-get install easystroke
Step 2:
Next, you’ll need to configure the gestures that are going to do all those cool things. Press the super key (a.k.a the windows key) and type in ‘easystroke’. Click on it when it appears. You may notice at this point, that nothing’s actually happened. This can be very confusing, so don’t waste time waiting for something to happen – it just won’t.
That’s just about it! Easystroke’s now running. Try moving your mouse whilst holding onto the left-click. You should see a line following the cursor. Now it’s time to bind some actions to the gestures Easystroke is capturing.
Step 3:
Easystroke’s easy-peasy to get to know. Its UI is so intuitive, I hardly think its necessary to explain it all. There are just a few tweaks you need to make (at least, I had to make) to get it running with the least possible hindrance. Without further ado, let’s continue.
Find ‘Easystroke’ once again in the Lens (press the super-key). Click on it, and this time, it should open a configuration window (The first time, it launches a daemon that is responsible to track your mouse’s movements), which should look a little like this (without all those diagrams and stuff):
To add an action, its a simple case of clicking on ‘Add Action’. It will create a new entry (usually ‘Gesture 1′) in the table right above the button (‘Add Action’). Rename this to something meaningful (like ‘Open Firefox’). Next, you need to decide whether that action spawns an application, is an alias for a keystroke, or for text, or simulate a button-press, or scroll-bar action. In this case (‘Open Firefox’), we need to spawn an application, so we choose ‘Command’ as the ‘type’. Under ‘Details’, double click it and type, in lower-case ‘firefox’ and press enter. At this point, you should have something that looks like this: (See the highlighted entry)
Now comes the tricky part – You’ll need to associate a gesture for this action. Before you do this, quickly tab over to the ‘Preferences’ tab. There, you’ll find a button ‘Gesture Button’ (the first one, incidentally). Click on it, and out pops a little dialog box with a large gray rectangle. Simply click inside of it; this is to set the initiation key for the gesture (basically tells easystroke to follow mouse movements, iff the mouse button is down simultaneously). Also make sure that the ‘Timeout’ checkbox is selected!
In the same tab (‘Preferences’), you might also want to tick the check box ‘Autostart easystroke’, so that it starts when you log in.
Getting back to setting up the gesture for the action ‘Open Firefox’, tab back into ‘Actions’ and double click on the ‘Stroke’ column of the table, corresponding to that action entry. It should open a small dialog box, that looks something like:
Now, hold the left mouse key down, and make a gesture – anything you want, really, that you would like to associate with opening firefox. If you’ve done it right, you should end up with something that looks like:
That’s it! Go ahead, give it a go! Close Easystroke’s configuration window, and do that gesture (make sure you’re holding onto the left mouse button while you’re ‘gesturing’). It should open firefox. Magic, isn’t it?
That was just one gesture. You can add as many as you want! Take a look at the screen shots above to get an idea of what you could have as actions. If this tutorial/howto just doesn’t cut it for you, here’s a more technical, better written, I daresay, article on Easystroke.
Any questions? Suggestions? Wanna flame this post? Well, feel free to write a comment.
Cheers!
