WeazyStroke

Gesture recognition for Wayland. Draw a stroke with your mouse, pen/tablet, stylus, or fingers and WeazyStroke runs an action — launch a command, send a key combo, type text, click a button, scroll, and more.

A desktop-environment-agnostic GTK4 + libadwaita app, built on the recognition core of the classic easystroke and rebuilt for Wayland. The gesture engine, GUI, and actions run on any Wayland compositor. The only compositor-dependent piece is the live stroke-trail overlay — it uses the wlr-layer-shell protocol (via gtk4-layer-shell), which KDE, wlroots-based compositors, etc. implement but GNOME's Mutter does not, so on GNOME everything works except the on-screen trail.

Features

• Every pointing device — one gesture engine across mouse, pen/tablet, stylus, and touch.
• Pen pressure → line width — the live trail thickens as you press harder, driven by real tablet pressure.
• Two-finger touch gestures — hold a finger inside a screen-edge band to arm, draw with a second finger; an expanding ring marks the armed point and the trail responds to finger contact size.
• Flexible triggers — a mouse button (with optional modifiers), the pen tip, the side button, or a "tip + side button" chord that keeps the side button free for other uses; plus a configurable touch edge.
• Live stroke overlay — a click-through trail that follows your stroke: a direction gradient with customizable start/end colors, Plain / Glow / Sparkle styles, adjustable width, a hairline onset taper, and an animated completion retract.
• Typed actions — per gesture: run a command, send a key combo, type text, click a button, scroll, or ignore.
• Sturdy recognition — record a gesture several times for multi-example matching; tune the match threshold.
• GTK4 + libadwaita GUI — an Actions table with per-gesture stroke thumbnails, paginated preferences, a glass aesthetic, a History tab, and an in-window stroke recorder.
• System tray — enable/disable, open preferences, quit (StatusNotifierItem).
• Autostart & live reload — one toggle installs a systemd user service; saving in the GUI applies instantly to the running daemon, no restart.

Install

Arch:

cd packaging && makepkg -si

From source:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DENABLE_ASAN=OFF
cmake --build build
sudo cmake --install build

Dependencies: libinput, libevdev, libxkbcommon, gtk4, gtk4-layer-shell, libadwaita, glib2, systemd (libudev); a C11/C++17 compiler, CMake ≥ 3.18. (Drop the -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE/-DENABLE_ASAN flags for a sanitized dev build; run the tests with ctest --test-dir build.)

Installs four binaries: eswl-daemon (engine), eswl-overlay (trail renderer), eswl-config (GUI), eswl-tray (tray).

Usage

1. Open WeazyStroke (eswl-config); enable Start on login to autostart it.
2. Record Stroke → draw it → name it → choose a Type + Argument (command, key, text, button, scroll) → Save.
3. Draw the gesture with your trigger:
   • Mouse — hold the configured button (+ optional modifiers) and draw.
   • Pen — tip, side button, or the "tip + side button" chord.
   • Touch — hold a finger in the chosen edge band, draw with a second finger.

Triggers, the trail, colors, pressure, and touch are all tunable in Preferences; changes apply live.

Permissions

The engine reads /dev/input/event* and read-writes /dev/uinput. The Arch package installs the udev rule; from source, install it and join the input group:

sudo cp packaging/99-easystroke-wayland.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger
sudo usermod -aG input "$USER"        # then re-login

GNOME

The engine, GUI, and actions work on GNOME, but not the live stroke trail: Mutter doesn't implement wlr-layer-shell, and a normal Wayland window can't be a click-through, always-on-top overlay. Drawing the trail there would require a GNOME Shell extension that renders on the shell stage, fed by the daemon over DBus. The overlay already sits behind a swappable process + line-protocol interface (TraceOverlay), so such a DBus backend would slot in with no engine changes. Future / community contribution — not planned (per-app detection on GNOME would need the same extension).

License

ISC, inheriting easystroke's license. Recognition core from easystroke by Thomas Jaeger.