Announcing easystroke, a gesture recognition app

[Tom Jaeger]

Hi,

I'd like to announce easystroke, a new gesture recognition application for linux. Gesture recognition means that you can draw arbitrary curves on the screen by holding down a specific mouse button, and if the program recognizes their shape, it will perform certain actions. For example, you can configure easystroke to maximize the current window if you draw a straight line in North-East direction.

My primary motivation for writing easystroke was to allow easy operation of a Tablet PCs even without a keyboard present, but of course it will work just as well with a mouse. It is not meant to replace an onscreen keyboard/input panel such as cellwriter, but rather supplement it.

Here's a short list of the program's main selling points:

• It aims to be easy to set up and to configure. There are no configuration files that need to be edited and no cryptic commands that have to be entered somewhere.
• It tries to give the user easy access to the most commonly used features: Setting up a new gesture requires just a few clicks and will show only one small popup dialog (to actually define the stroke)
• It allows you to use strokes of arbitrary shape. There is no requirement that gestures have to be composed of line segments, and curvy shapes such as an 'S' or a 'G' work just fine.
• Some of the features make life without a keyboard a lot easier: You can emulate a scrollwheel, ignore the next stroke and pass the next mouse action to the application (possibly with a modifier held down, so that you can Alt-move or Alt-resize a window without a keyboard) and emulate an additional button that your tablet pen didn't even have in the first place.
• The project is still young, so there's much more to come.

EDIT (Aug 3): The latest version is 0.2.1. See this post for details.
EDIT (Aug 17): Released 0.2.2.
EDIT (Dec 12): Current version is 0.3.0
EDIT (Feb 2): Released 0.4.0

The program is available as a .deb package tested on Ubuntu Intrepid and as a source tar.gz. It is also available through my launchpad PPA. There are a few screenshots on the project's documentation page.

Thank you,
Tom

[Chokkan]

Looks very cool. I'm currently using Gestikk which, I think shares some similarities to your project. I'll give easystroke a try. Could you give me a few pointers on what makes this different (better?) than Gestikk?

[Tom Jaeger]

Hmm, I haven't spent too much time evaluating gestikk, so I might not be the best person to comment on this, but at least from the point of view of a tablet pc user, easystroke has a few clear advantages: It is more flexible in what strokes it allows (I haven't been able to define an S-shaped stroke in gestikk, for example) and there are actions such as ignore and scroll that are specifically designed to make keyboardless operation easier. Another obvious difference is that gestikk will pass strokes to the applications, producing spurious right-clicks. I'd also like to think that easystroke's UI is more polished, but of course, this is a matter of opinion.

[Luffield]

I use Gestikk too and I'm pretty happy with it, but I think I'll give easystroke a try because I'm curious about the statistics

[bash]

I'm sitting in front of a windows box atm, so I can't try it. But personally what I'm looking for is basically a version of the firefox plugin all-in-one-gestures for the desktop. Does your programm come close to that?

[Chokkan]

I think that is pretty much what it is. Check out the sourceforge page. Pretty good documentation there.

[barbedsaber]

its bad enough going onto a windows computer, pressing super key+space, and getting annoyed when gnome-do doesn't come up.

[Mazza558]

How will this work with Firefox and a mouse gestures addon?

[Luffield]

Originally Posted by barbedsaber its bad enough going onto a windows computer, pressing super key+space, and getting annoyed when gnome-do doesn't come up.

You can install Launchy. It's not as good as Gnome-Do but it's better than nothing.

[barbedsaber]

Originally Posted by Luffield You can install Launchy. It's not as good as Gnome-Do but it's better than nothing.

school computer, but thanks anyway.