COSMIC Workspaces Applets

Panel applets for the COSMIC desktop environment that open the workspaces overview with pointer gestures.

Applets

Hot Corner

Moving the pointer to the top-left corner of the screen shows the workspaces overview, like the GNOME hot corner.

The corner is a tiny transparent surface on the overlay layer, above panels and the dock, so it works with any panel layout. Clicking the panel button opens a small menu with an on/off toggle and a manual trigger.

Swipe to Workspaces

A three-finger swipe up on the touchpad shows the workspaces overview; a swipe down hides it.

Gestures are read directly from the touchpad's multitouch evdev device, because the compositor consumes multi-finger gestures and does not forward them to clients. Reading /dev/input requires membership of the input group:

sudo usermod -aG input $USER

Then log out and back in. Until then the applet's menu shows the command as selectable text with a button that copies it to the clipboard.

Requirements

• COSMIC desktop environment (developed and tested against 1.7.0)
• Rust toolchain (rustup is sufficient; no system build dependencies)

Installation

Build both applets in release mode and install them for the current user:

./install.sh

The script:

• builds both applets with cargo build --release (the release profile uses thin LTO),
• installs the binaries to ~/.local/bin ($XDG_BIN_HOME when set),
• installs the desktop files and icons to ~/.local/share ($XDG_DATA_HOME when set), where cosmic-panel discovers applets.

The applets do not run as standalone applications: they are started by cosmic-panel when they are added to a panel. After installing, open cosmic-settings, go to Desktop -> Panel, and add "Hot Corner" and "Swipe to Workspaces" to a panel. They start automatically with the panel from then on.

To build a single applet without installing it:

cargo build --release -p cosmic-applet-hot-corner
cargo build --release -p cosmic-applet-swipe-to-workspaces

Uninstallation

./install.sh --uninstall

Remove the applets from your panel in cosmic-settings as well if they were added.

Configuration

Both applets can be installed and used independently. When both are installed they share a single settings file, ~/.config/cosmic/io.github.lethevimlet.CosmicWorkspacesGestures (hot_corner and swipe keys), so there is one place to configure them. Each applet's panel button also opens a menu with its toggle and a manual trigger.

Behavior notes

• Both applets toggle the workspaces view through the com.system76.CosmicWorkspaces D-Bus interface, the same component the panel's workspaces button uses.
• A swipe must travel about 10% of the touchpad height and be mostly vertical, so scrolling and the compositor's horizontal workspace swipes never trigger it.
• The applets are idle when not used: the corner monitor blocks on the Wayland socket and the gesture monitor blocks on the touchpad device.

Development

cargo build --release
cargo test

The swipe recognizer is a pure state machine covered by unit tests; run cargo test after changing it.

License

GPL-3.0-only. The swipe applet's panel icons are adapted from GNOME's Adwaita icon theme (LGPL-2.1-or-later).