Where it started
On Windows, a three-finger swipe moves between windows while your fingers are still moving. On my Arch desktop, Hyprland’s own gesture actions only fire after you lift your fingers, so nothing follows you while you slide. By the time anything happens, the swipe is already over.
I wanted that feeling of the highlight tracking my hand, on my own machine.
How it works
- Read the touchpad directly. The plugin listens to touchpad events itself instead of waiting for the window manager’s gesture to finish, so it sees the motion as it happens.
- Show the windows. As soon as three fingers start sliding sideways, a row of live previews of the windows on the current workspace appears.
- Follow the fingers. The highlight moves one window at a time as you slide, in the same left-to-right order the windows sit on screen, and stops at the ends.
- Lift to switch. Lifting your fingers focuses the highlighted window. Escape or a click outside cancels.
Details I cared about
- Only what it needs. It takes horizontal three-finger swipes and nothing else. Vertical swipes and every other gesture still go to Hyprland.
- Windows you can’t see. Windows scrolled off screen get no new frames, so their tile shows the last frame the switcher saw, or the app icon.
- Alt+Tab too. An optional Alt+Tab mode uses the same previews, most recently used first.
- Saying the cost out loud. Reading the touchpad means adding your user to the
inputgroup, which lets your programs read every input device, including the keyboard. That’s a real cost, so the instructions say so plainly and leave the choice to you.
Where it stands
Published as an Omarchy plugin. It needs a touchpad, the Quickshell-based Omarchy shell, and libinput-tools.