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