[luau] Touchpad

[Warren Togami]

On Mon, 2002-07-22 at 01:40, Michael Ableyev wrote:
> Now, this little question may sound crazy.. at least for now, BUT..
> Would anyone have any idea if it is at all remotely possible to get certain control of a laptop touchpad under lunix? By 
> "certain control" I mean the following: with manufacturers drivers, under winblows it's possible to scroll the window (for 
> example) when moving your finger vertically on the right side of the touchpad. Now, you may say: Well thats with manufacturer's 
> driver and I how the heck your going to recognize touchpad edges? But! it seems they already are recognized! When I tap twice 
> (equal to click + drag) and then move to the edge of the touchpad, the pointer seems to slowly move  in the direction of the 
> edge of the touchpad. It is possible, though, that this is recognized on the hardware level and that'll proly make things a 
> whole lot more difficult. But, then again, I did see this function on several different laptops (is it a standrad?)
> Unfortunately, i'm not a knowledgable programmer and wouldn't know how to access hardware on low level, neither would I know how 
> to bind that "side axis" to a scroll bar of a currently active window (and that is IF it's a standrad!). Nonetheless, this is 
> one of those little things that will need to be implemented (imho) if linux is to compete as a notebook os.
> So.. anyone have any idea where I should start looking for clues?
> 

My Sony Vaio laptop does this too.  I think it is one of the features
specific to the Synaptic touchpad driver in Windows, with no actual
hardware hooks.  I think the Windows driver itself interprets certain
gestures done within certain coordinates of the touchpad and reacts
doing certain things.

I will check this out myself one of these days.  If the Synaptics
Windows driver really does use simple touchpad coordinates it may be
possible to hack an X mouse driver to emulate Z-axis movement as if it
were a wheel.