GNOME 50 · Wayland

Five-finger pinch.
On Ubuntu.

Bring a familiar MacBook trackpad gesture to Ubuntu. Five Pinch adds five-finger pinch actions to Linux desktops running GNOME 50 on Wayland.

Install Five Pinch Read the documentation
App grid

Gesture illustration · choose a direction to preview

For Ubuntu 26.04Tested on MacBook Pro 2017Other touchpads welcomeCheck requirements

A familiar trackpad experience.

Pinch to open your apps; spread to close the app grid. Choose an action for each direction and the sensitivity that feels right. You can also show the overview or reveal the desktop.

Set up your gestures
Five Pinch settings with gestures enabled, pinch in set to Open app grid, pinch out set to Close app grid, and sensitivity set to Sensitive.
Five Pinch 0.7.2 · actual settings window

Install Five Pinch.

Free and open source under the MIT license. Install on GNOME 50 with Wayland; APT installs the required dependencies. Extension Manager is optional.

Download a .deb Installation guide
Terminal · one-time setup
curl -fL https://nymeriq.github.io/five-pinch/setup-apt.sh -o /tmp/five-pinch-apt-setup.sh
sudo sh /tmp/five-pinch-apt-setup.sh
sudo apt update
sudo apt install five-pinch

Requires curl and gpg. Missing either?

Log out, then log back in.

Save your work first. Locking the screen is not enough.

  1. Open Five Pinch Settings.
  2. Enable gestures and choose your actions.
  3. Start with Balanced; try Sensitive for smaller movements.

How Five Pinch works.

A read-only reader tracks five fingertips. A GNOME extension turns a recognized pinch into your chosen action.

Your existing touchpad driver stays in place.

No firmware changes, driver replacement, or exclusive device grab.

rinertia scrolling protection.

Automatic rinertia protection filters leftover virtual scrolls around a five-finger interaction. Without rinertia, there is nothing to filter.

Disable, reset, or remove.

Disable gestures at any time. A reset command and package purge provide a documented path back.

Before you install.

Does Five Pinch work with my MacBook trackpad on Ubuntu?

It was tested on a 2017 MacBook Pro with an Apple SPI Touchpad, Ubuntu 26.04, GNOME 50, and Wayland. Other MacBooks and non-Apple touchpads are welcome to try it, but are not verified. Your touchpad must expose five independently tracked finger positions. Check the hardware requirements.

Does it bring the Apple multitouch experience to Linux?

Five Pinch brings one familiar part of the Apple trackpad experience to Ubuntu: configurable five-finger pinch gestures. It began on a MacBook running Linux. It does not recreate every macOS multitouch gesture or provide continuous, finger-following app-grid animation. Set up five-finger pinch on Ubuntu.

Why use it if Linux already sees five fingers?

A five-finger contact count does not necessarily produce a usable pinch event. Five Pinch reads the five contact positions directly and lets its GNOME extension perform your chosen action. It keeps your existing driver in place. See how gesture detection works.

Does it replace normal swipes or pinch-to-zoom?

Five Pinch adds configurable five-finger pinch actions. It does not add two-finger pinch-to-zoom. Optional protections suppress accidental swipe tails after a five-finger interaction and leftover rinertia scrolling; they do not globally change gesture sensitivity. Read about gesture protection.

Can I disable it or remove it later?

Yes. Turn off Enable gestures to pause detection, or follow the reset and package removal steps to uninstall. Five Pinch does not replace drivers or firmware, or change rinertia configuration. Disable or uninstall Five Pinch.

Understand every setting.

Installation, every setting, compatibility, updates, and removal—in one place.

Explore the documentation