libinput support in Eamcs?

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Over the weekend, I've been trying to grok the state of touch events in
Linux, and...  I'm not sure I understand everything.  It seems to be a
mess?

But apparently, Linux is moving away from the older input libraries
(synaptics for touchpad and libev for general events) and to libinput,
both on X and Wayland.  From what I understand, it's deemed to be The
Future.

(Please correct me if I misunderstand.)

Now, for touch events: It's complicated.  There are several layers of
things that block touch event handling, and to get at them all, you
either have to hack Gnome/gtk or use libevent directly.  (Simple events
are available, but not things like "two finger pitch".)

So I was wondering...  would it make sense to add libinput support to
Emacs?

I'm thinking of, like:

(setq events (make-network-process :family 'libinput :remote 
"/dev/input/input7"))

and then you'd get out something like

(:timestamp <...> :event 'button-down :x <> :y <>)

or whatever libevent returns, and you can write nice filtering functions
on that.

Or something.

You have to be in the input group to access /dev/input, though, so
that's kinda yucky.

And this is really low-level, so we'd have to write higher-level
function to translate this all to sensible events.

So I'm not sure something like this would make sense.  :-)  But what do
all y'all think?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no