Glide: touchpad intent as a modifier signal

[tompassarelli]

Built a small companion daemon called Glide that detects intentional touchpad activity and emits an active/inactive signal. I originally explored whether this belonged inside Kanata, but ended up feeling it made more sense as a separate utility with Kanata as one consumer rather than as part of Kanata itself.

Right now I use it to enable keyboard-driven mouse inputs while the touchpad is actively in use — basically gliding on the pad, clicking and directional input on keys.

The interesting part was that the algorithm got simpler after collecting traces: I started with a rolling-window heuristic, but the strongest separating feature turned out to be consecutive motion streaks, so the current version uses a streak detector.

Github: https://github.com/tompassarelli/glide

Writeup here: https://tompassarelli.org/software/from_layerpad_to_glide/

[CosmoDm]

This is great functionality! Can this Glide work on Windows with the Interception driver?

[tompassarelli]

Thanks! I only targeted linux during development, so I don't expect Windows to work (without dev effort)