Adding touchscreen support: feasible?

Software
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I want to add basic touchscreen support to KiCAD – namely, panning and zooming the schematic. My particular setup is somewhat niche; I do layout on my main monitor, whilst the schematic is open on a touchscreen monitor on the desk in front of me. This allows me to quickly poke at symbols to navigate to them in PCBnew. I’m sure this could be more generally useful for people with hybrid laptops and whatnot.

More importantly though, I want to be Tony Stark. I want to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report. I want to be that electric car commercial lab coat lady with the awesome future tablet. Clicking and tapping are not the future. Pinching is the future.

So, before I delve too deep into research, I thought I’d ask in case someone has answers ready:

  • Can the plugin interface support this?
  • If not, does this seem like an easy fix? Is it a “just add a few event handlers” thing, or a “rewrite the entire project with a different GUI library” thing?
  • Do the maintainers generally accept random little contributions like this from unknown developers?

Thanks

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You can do this already on macOS with the right hardware. Ive got the layout on my main laptop screen and the schematic on my iPad. You can pinch/zoom & pan on either the trackpad or the iPad (whichever has focus). Its a great way to work - very portable. I still use an external monitor by preference most of the time - but that’s mainly because its linked via a docking station to other useful devices.

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You can start from here Commits · multitouch-gestures · dsa-t / kicad · GitLab
(I don’t have devices where these gesture events work)

Jul 2024 update:

Multitouch gestures support was merged and enabled on Windows in 8.99.

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