Hey folks, brief update and sorry for the long wait.
Full transparency: my monitor brightness work took way longer than I had anticipated and there are still a handful of bugs that I or the KWin people need to fix more or less urgently. But that feature is in, I anticipate I won’t spend much more than a week or two on this batch of improvements.
But also, we haven’t been entirely idle. Natalie Clarius and I submitted a grant proposal to NLnet which would provide funding for several months to work on touch gestures as well as stroke gestures (a.k.a. mouse gestures). If this gets accepted, I can make it my main focus. If not, I’ll still work on it but will have to do it in addition to other stuff that pays the bills. Whatever NLnet decides in the end, at least we came up with a somewhat detailed plan for what needs to be done to make this happen.
Furthermore, @Duha approached me with an idea to make input handling one of KDE’s priority goals for the next two years, we spent some time putting this together, and the community thought it was one of the three most important topics to work on. Which mainly means that we as goal champions now have to do more communication and recruitment to get everyone else fired up and chiming in, but hey. Mouse gestures are specifically mentioned in the original proposal, this work is now officially a priority task for KDE.
I figure that at this point, I’ll miss @fusionfuture’s 2024 deadline. I know you guys have been waiting patiently for this and I apologize for signing up for this before I was really able to make the time. If anyone still wants to grab this before NLnet gets back to us in about two months or so (I think?), by all means go for it. Happy to forfeit the bounty if someone else can get it done faster.