hyprswipe

Touchpad-style workspace swipes, on a mouse

⚠️ This project is 100% vibe-coded slop — see Model credits for who to blame; not a single line was written by a human. It has — and will keep having — stupid bugs LLMs can't see. The kernel drops the grab when the process dies, so your mouse always comes back; use at your own risk.

Two mouse gestures for Hyprland:

• Hold LMB+RMB and drag horizontally → workspaces swipe 1:1, exactly like a 3-finger touchpad swipe (gesture = 3, horizontal, workspace).
• Hold mainMod (Super/Win) + LMB+RMB and drag → the active window is carried across workspaces, one per --move-step mouse units, view following, for as long as you drag (Hyprland has no native "carry window" swipe, so this is quantised per notch rather than a smooth slide).

How it works

It grabs the mouse's evdev stream and passes everything through unchanged. While LMB+RMB are held it swallows the buttons/motion and instead drives a synthetic 3-finger swipe on a virtual uinput touchpad it creates. libinput recognises that as a real gesture, so Hyprland does the actual pixel-proportional workspace movement — no custom switching logic, no Hyprland plugin, survives updates.

If mainMod is held when the chord starts, it instead fires hyprctl dispatch movetoworkspace e±1 per notch (move-window mode). mainMod state is read by observing (not grabbing) every keyboard exposing the --mod-key.

The event loop is fully event-driven: epoll over the mouse, keyboards and a one-shot timerfd (the click-swallow window) — no timeouts, no polling.

Click swallowing: a button press is held back for a short window (--window, default 35 ms). If the other button arrives in time → it's a gesture chord, both presses are discarded. Otherwise the press is flushed as a normal click/hold.

Install

One command (clones, builds, installs, sets up /dev/uinput and group access):

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Petyok/hyprswipe/main/install.sh)

Pass --dry-run to see every step without executing it.

Arch:

makepkg -si            # PKGBUILD is in the repo

By hand:

make
sudo make install      # -> /usr/local/bin/hyprswipe
sudo usermod -aG input "$USER"   # to read the mouse node; log out and back in
sudo modprobe uinput             # and see the udev rule in install.sh

Usage

hyprswipe --sens 4

With no flags it grabs the first mouse it can. If that picks the wrong pointer, narrow the scan by name or pin the node:

hyprswipe --match "Logitech" --sens 4
hyprswipe --grab /dev/input/event5 --sens 4

Device names come from cat /proc/bus/input/devices.

Autostart from ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf:

exec-once = /usr/local/bin/hyprswipe --sens 4

Options

• --sens F mouse-unit → touchpad-unit gain (default 1.0). 4 feels good on a 1000 Hz gaming mouse. Negative flips swipe direction.
• --window MS chord-detect / click-swallow window (default 35).
• --mod-key C evdev keycode that means mainMod (default 125 = KEY_LEFTMETA). XKB remaps such as ctrl:swap_lwin_lctl do not change this: evdev sees the raw keycode, so 125 stays correct.
• --move-step F mouse units per workspace in move-window mode (default 1500).
• --move-min MS minimum gap between workspace jumps, debounce (default 120).
• --move-invert flip move-window direction.
• --match NAME restrict the scan to devices whose name contains NAME.
• --grab /dev/input/eventN grab exactly this node, no scanning.

Nodes already grabbed by someone else are skipped, so with Interception Tools running, --match lands on its virtual passthrough output rather than fighting it for the physical node.

If stdin is not a terminal, hyprswipe runs as an Interception Tools plugin instead (stdin → stdout):

intercept -g $DEVNODE | hyprswipe | uinput -d $DEVNODE

Requirements

• Linux with /dev/uinput. No root at runtime if /dev/uinput is writable by your user (a udev ACL rule is enough); otherwise run as root or adjust permissions.
• libevdev and pkg-config to build.
• Hyprland configured with a 3-finger horizontal workspace gesture (gesture = 3, horizontal, workspace), which is the default.

Developed and used on Arch with Hyprland 0.55.2.

Why a virtual touchpad

The obvious implementation is to watch the mouse and call hyprctl dispatch workspace per notch. That gives you discrete jumps, not the 1:1 pixel-following slide a real touchpad gesture produces. Emitting a synthetic multitouch swipe instead hands the whole animation to libinput and Hyprland, so the motion is identical to the real thing and nothing has to be reimplemented.

Getting libinput to accept the virtual device took two non-obvious constraints, both found by trial:

• Do not advertise ABS_PRESSURE or ABS_MT_TOUCH_MAJOR. If they are present, libinput compares them against its touch-down thresholds; the values a synthetic device reports fall below those thresholds, so every contact is classified as hover. The device shows up correctly and is then silently ignored.
• Do not use Apple's vendor id (0x05ac). libinput enables model quirks for Apple touchpads and starts expecting the real bcm5974 protocol, which this device does not speak.

--match iterates the event nodes and takes the first one it can actually grab, which makes it robust against event-node renumbering across reboots and against Interception Tools holding the physical node (hyprswipe then lands on its virtual passthrough output).

Model credits

Built end-to-end by Claude models in sessions with a human — the design, the C, the libinput reverse-engineering above, this README and the packaging. Not a single line was typed by a person.

The human contributed the idea, the hardware, the testing, and the swearing.

License

AGPL-3.0-only. See LICENSE.