circulartrackpad

A userspace daemon for the circular Panasonic Let's Note trackpad. It restores outer-ring scrolling under Wayland and adds compact gestures suited to the unusually small 44 mm pad:

• inner-disc pointer movement
• outer-ring scrolling
• one-finger left-click and two-finger right-click taps
• ordinary passthrough for all physical buttons
• two-finger horizontal window switching
• native GNOME Activities and workspace swipes

The daemon exclusively grabs the real evdev device and creates virtual pointer, shortcut-keyboard, and gesture-only touchpad devices through uinput.

Hardware

Developed and tested on a Panasonic Let's Note with a Synaptics TM3562-003 touchpad (HID 06cb:cdea, coordinates 0..528). Other models may require changes to the vendor/product IDs in install.sh and the geometry constants in the driver.

Install

Requires stable Rust and a Linux system with udev, uinput, and systemd:

git clone https://github.com/kungaa/circulartrackpad
cd circulartrackpad
./install.sh
./enable-autostart.sh

install.sh builds and installs the binary and udev rules. enable-autostart.sh creates the config and starts the systemd user service. Log out and back in if the device permissions do not apply immediately.

Upgrading

From an existing checkout:

git pull
./install.sh
./enable-autostart.sh

Configuration

Persistent settings use the XDG user configuration location:

${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/circulartrackpad/config.toml

enable-autostart.sh preserves an existing config when upgrading.

Edit config.toml, then validate and apply it with:

circulartrackpad restart

Invalid configuration does not stop the running service. A missing config uses built-in defaults.

pointer = 1.5
scroll = 5.0
ring = 0.65
invert_scroll = false
tap = true
tap_timeout_ms = 180
tap_move_threshold = 20

[two_finger_swipe]
enabled = true
distance = 80
left = ["KEY_LEFTALT", "KEY_ESC"]
right = ["KEY_LEFTSHIFT", "KEY_LEFTALT", "KEY_ESC"]

[native_gestures]
enabled = true

Shortcut arrays use Linux KEY_* names in press order.

Older [button_gestures] and two_finger_swipe.up settings remain accepted for upgrade compatibility, but are ignored with a warning. Remove them after upgrading.

Command-line options override the config:

circulartrackpad [OPTIONS]
circulartrackpad restart

  -d, --device <DEVICE>             Input device path [default: auto-detect]
  -p, --pointer <POINTER>           Pointer sensitivity
  -s, --scroll <SCROLL>             Scroll ticks per radian
  -r, --ring <RING>                 Ring threshold fraction (0.0-1.0)
  -i, --invert-scroll               Invert scroll direction
      --no-invert-scroll            Do not invert scroll direction
      --tap                         Enable tap-to-click
      --no-tap                      Disable tap-to-click
      --tap-timeout <MILLISECONDS>  Tap timeout
      --tap-move-threshold <UNITS>  Tap movement threshold

Gestures

Physical buttons and ring scrolling

Physical buttons pass through unchanged. Outer-ring motion scrolls, including while a button is held.

Two-finger swipes

Start with two fingers in the inner zone:

• swipe left: next window (Alt+Esc by default)
• swipe right: previous window (Shift+Alt+Esc by default)
• swipe up/down: GNOME's progressive Activities gesture

Horizontal switching fires after the configured distance. Vertical movement drives GNOME's native gesture animation. A short two-finger tap remains right-click.

Three- and four-finger swipes

On GNOME Wayland, three- and four-finger horizontal swipes switch workspaces; vertical swipes control Activities. Set native_gestures.enabled = false to disable them.

How it works

The daemon grabs the physical evdev device and creates separate uinput pointer, shortcut-keyboard, and gesture-touchpad devices. A touch that starts in the inner zone moves the pointer; one that starts on the ring scrolls.

Native gestures require GNOME on Wayland. There is no Xorg gesture fallback.

Troubleshooting

systemctl --user status circulartrackpad.service
journalctl --user -u circulartrackpad.service -n 30 --no-pager
libinput list-devices

The physical device still appears under hid-rmi/libinput; this is normal. circulartrackpad gestures should be listed as a touchpad. Log out and back in if the service reports a device permission error.

Development and testing

The project uses Rust 2021 and stable Rust:

cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test
cargo build --release
bash -n install.sh enable-autostart.sh

Acknowledgements

Based on the original mikiobraun/circulartrackpad and the fork b3r/circulartrackpad.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.