Libinput 0.19 Brings Improved Pointer Acceleration

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 6 July 2015 at 09:09 AM EDT. 5 Comments
WAYLAND
Peter Hutterer released version 0.19 of Libinput, the input handling library relied upon by Wayland compositors and optionally by the X.Org Server via the specialized xf86-input-libinput driver.

The primary change with libinput 0.19 is improved pointer acceleration code. The Red Hat developer explained:
The biggest change in this release is improved pointer acceleration code. Previously, slow movements were decelerated. Of course, this means the slower you move the mouse, the further you have to actually move it to move the pointer by one pixel. While this enhances precision, the parameters on that weren't ideal and made for awkward interaction. After a bit of fine-tuning the deceleration curve is now a narrower and steeper, i.e. we decelerate only on really slow movements, when we need the precision. For anything resembling normal motion the pointer response is effectively 1:1, making the cursor respond nicely to your mouse movement.

Low-dpi devices had a bug where they would skip pixels for small movements. This was caused by the pointer normalization to 1000dpi. Devices with a native resolution below 1000dpi now have their own acceleration curve, providing much better behaviour.
Libinput 0.19 also has better responsiveness of the touchpad when switching from trackpoint to the trouchpad. There's also a variety of other bug-fixes -- around 50 changes from Peter himself in this new version.
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