Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by both modern X.Org Server and Wayland desktop environments.

One of the most notable end-user features with the upcoming libinput 1.31 release is enabling support for fast 3-finger swipes when 3-finger drag is enabled. Hutterer explained of the fast three-finger swipes event:

"Related to touchpads: we now support fast 3fg swipes when 3fg drag is enabled. Previously, enabling 3fg drag meant 3fg swipe was no longer available since the finger movement for both is physically identical. However, swipe gestures are tightly integrated into some desktops so we now support a "fast swipe": three fingers that move quickly and [immediately] trigger a swipe, not a 3fg drag. The timeout is intentionally quite short, the drag is still the primary feature. The above applies to 4fg swipe/drag if enabled."

Another user-facing change with libinput 1.31 is allowing configurable timeouts on the disable-while-typing and disable-while-trackpointing timeouts for laptops:

"The disable-while-typing and disable-while-trackpointing timeouts are now configurable (within reasonable limits). These timeouts specify how long the touchpad or trackpoint should be inactive after key presses. Note that libinput internally uses multiple timeouts depending on the original event, configurable is only the "long" timeout after a key press + release which should be good enough for the vast majority of use-cases."

Libinput 1.31-rc1 also brings new API Additions and other developer improvements. All the details on this libinput test release on wayland-devel.