KDE's Mega Sprint 2026 in Graz brought a group of about 20 KDE contributors together in early April, to discuss technical challenges, make decisions, and get stuff done. With travel support from KDE e.V. (thanks to your donations), I was able to join the group there.
As a KDE user, I myself use Input Action: https://wiki.inputactions.org/main/index.html
for advanced touchpad gestures. You can even trigger different gestures based on the initial position of fingers. It features swipe, tap, hold, pinch, circle, rotate gesture triggers.
It is kinda neat!
Input Actions is great! Its author (taj-ny) implemented an impressive amount of functionality in a relatively short amount of time, and its configuration format is both powerful and well thought-out. Definitely an inspiration. I take a tiny bit of credit for the mouse gesture support in Input Actions, which was derived from my earlier prototype for KWin (which itself was derived from the classic EasyStroke gesture recognizer).
In contrast to Input Actions, this project is about bringing gesture customization support to Plasma users by default, with a friendly GUI in System Settings. Input Actions on the other hand is configured exclusively via YAML file, and its author has mentioned previously that he is not interested in upstreaming his code into Plasma. Because it’s using unstable KWin API without being part of Plasma, Input Actions has to be rebuilt after every major version upgrade if it isn’t provided by distro package repositories.
I’d like to think that the two projects are complementary. I’m hoping they can co-exist, with Input Actions offering the most powerful customization possibilities for enthusiasts, and Plasma gesture support bringing customization possibilities to a more mainstream audience.
Hello! I’m actually the user you quote from the Brodie Robertson comment section! Funny to be following the process of touchpad gestures for KDE and find your post and my comment. To your point about no “promises” made, it’s true that nothing hard and fast has been out there, but there have been many false starts. I started paying attention to this in about 2022 when I remember some individuals posting about customizable touchpad gestures coming as part of Wayland updates in KDE 6.0 and I was excited it would finally work for me for laptops. I then saw a feature list closer to launch and they weren’t listed and I asked about it on Nate Graham’s blog, and he mentioned it had slipped and would likely be in 6.1. Of course, nothing in 6.1, and on and on.
Configurable touchpad gestures were actually on the public KDE roadmap as planned for 6.7 but labeled as “not yet merged” as recently as 2 or 3 weeks ago but that was, of course, deleted, and I believe it’s now labeled for, “unknown release.”
Personally, I have a professional workflow that is enormously aided by customizable touchpad gestures as I need to constantly bounce back and forth between many different windows and apps. While I use KDE on my desktop, I’ve never installed it on my laptops, and have gone with Gnome with (excellent) customizable touchpad extensions (which of course break with every update).
I’ve long considered KDE the most advanced, most intentional desktop operating system in existence. Given that, and given the fact that, in the US at least, laptops outsell desktops 3 to 1, I’ve found how far behind KDE is on touchpad gestures than every other major OS (Gnome with extensions, Windows, Mac, etc) quite head scratching. Don’t any KDE devs use laptops? Doesn’t this bother any of them as much as it does me? I’ve considered learning coding just to help contribute to this…
As a longtime KDE financial supporter, I know it’ll get there eventually with your and others’ hard work, but I’ve been starting to feel like the “It’s been 84 years” meme and hope I get a truly outstanding KDE version for laptops before I grow old and retire.
Thank you for your contributions to KDE!
I’ve used a laptop as my only KDE computer for 10 years.
I guess not? Personally I don’t really use gestures all that much. Maybe this is because our current ones suck, I dunno. But feel like I usually have two hands near the keyboard when I’m on my laptop, and that being the case, it’s easy enough to reach the keyboard shortcuts for anything that also has a gesture attached to it.
The only one I find myself consistently using is three-finger pinch for zoom in/out, which I have no desire to change for something else. And the only thing I think I’d change if we did have customizable gestures would be binding “Peek at Desktop” to four fingers down.
This is in no way a defense of not improving the situation here. 
I agree it could stand to be improved. I’m just being overly literal and directly answering your questions that might have been rhetorical in nature.
Thank you for your reply! Yes, of course my questions were somewhat in jest, but also somewhat real, since because I see people around me professionally and in my household who use gestures all the time, I’ve never considered it a niche feature.
The most useful touchpad gesture for me personally on the Gnome extension is the Windows 11-like three finger horizontal switching between active apps and screens. For me, that is heaven sent, especially as all of the many apps and windows I’m using (some in remote desktops) don’t all universally behave with keyboard shortcuts for switching.
I have two teenagers who are required by their school to use Apple laptops, and I watch them and their friends use their devices and they’re constantly flying through gestures. I imagine for them coming to KDE would be somewhat difficult.
Again, I trust that KDE will get to that finish line (eventually). Thank you enormously for all you do for KDE!
I had been hoping we could get an initial version in for 6.7, but there turned out to be just not enough time to get it finished and tested before the freeze.
The timeline was made a bit worse because we had a very long, thorough session about gestures during the sprint in April, which ended up causing some re-thinking and re-design - e.g. more work for Jakob and Natalie.
Most probably, I’d guess!
Yes! I am not the only one really looking forward to this as well.
That’s pretty much how I started, and now I get paid to improve KDE stuff all the time! 
What it boils down to really is:
Jakob and Natalie continue to put a massive amount of work into gestures, and it is coming - but they are also only human! 
Not just human, but also flawed 
but then again, until we have more people joining the effort, this is what you’ll have to make do with, so… er… wheeee!
Thanks everyone for the interesting and constructive discussion!
Hi all, not sure this is the right place to ask - but i’m very much looking forward to the implementation of touchpad gestures;
Does KDE also have a gesture for showing “all windows of the currently active app” ?
In macOS this is called “App Expose” (4 finger swipe down.)
(i’m aware of the “Overview”, which shows ALL apps instead. That’s what macOS calls "Mission Control")
Thank you!