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Carousel: Gestures somewm-only

You will learn

  • How to enable 3-finger swipe viewport panning
  • How the gesture tracking and snap behavior works
  • How to set up gestures for the vertical variant
  • How to adjust scroll animation speed
  • How to remove a gesture binding

Enable 3-Finger Swipe​

One line in your rc.lua enables touchpad gesture scrolling:

awful.layout.suit.carousel.make_gesture_binding()

This creates a 3-finger swipe binding that pans the carousel viewport horizontally. Place it after your keybinding setup.

How It Works​

The gesture has three phases:

  1. Trigger. When a 3-finger swipe begins on a screen using the carousel layout, the current animation is stopped and the starting scroll position is recorded.
  2. Track. During the swipe, the viewport follows your fingers 1:1. Moving three fingers left scrolls the strip to the right (revealing columns on the right).
  3. Snap. On release, the viewport animates to center the column nearest to the viewport's center and focuses that column's first client.

The snap animation uses the same scroll_duration and easing curve as keyboard-driven scrolling.

Vertical Variant​

For the vertical carousel, use the vertical gesture binding:

awful.layout.suit.carousel.vertical.make_gesture_binding()

This responds to vertical 3-finger swipes (dy axis) instead of horizontal.

You can enable both if you use both carousel orientations:

local carousel = awful.layout.suit.carousel
carousel.make_gesture_binding()
carousel.vertical.make_gesture_binding()

Adjust Animation Speed​

The snap animation on release uses carousel.scroll_duration. To make it faster or slower:

-- Snappy 100ms snap
awful.layout.suit.carousel.scroll_duration = 0.1

-- Slower 400ms snap
awful.layout.suit.carousel.scroll_duration = 0.4

-- Instant snap (no animation)
awful.layout.suit.carousel.scroll_duration = 0

This also affects keyboard-driven scroll animations.

Remove a Gesture Binding​

make_gesture_binding() returns a gesture binding object. Store it and call :remove() to unbind:

local carousel = awful.layout.suit.carousel
local binding = carousel.make_gesture_binding()

-- Later, to remove it:
binding:remove()

See Also​