Mastering Touch & Stylus on GNU+Linux Laptops

[ew9d]

I recently got a laptop that has both touch and stylus support in the screen itself. I got a pen and it is connected and it works, even the pressure sensitivity. It's supposed to also communicate the angle of the pen though I have yet to see that.

I'm interested in really learning how to use the GIMP image editor more fully, and make the best use of the stylus for creating things.

I've used GIMP for as long as I have used Linux. I've done a lot with it editing something that started out as a photo or a screenshot or a scan. But I don't think I've really mastered it. Particularly I've always felt awkward creating something from scratch in GIMP. And I suspect that is because a mouse or trackpad don't feel very natural to me as a writing instrument. Well now I have a literal writing instrument that works in Linux!

I'm not an artist and I'm not trying to learn to make "art". But I would like to understand better how to take advantage of different brush strokes and pressure settings, color palettes, etc. and getting more out of the stylus I now have and the creative side of the GIMP as opposed to just the editing as I have done so far.


There's definitely Photoshop classes and probably a Photoshop Meetup Group. But I have no interest in adobe's products.

I'm also interested in other stylus-enabled apps (I have a few to share) and tweaking my Linux environment to be more useful with touch and stylus input. For instance I can tap and drag in Google maps, but I can't pinch to zoom still! I have to tap that damn plus and minus button like a peasant and it's humiliating. I would like to get my touch screen input in Linux working every bit as well, and the same ways as it does in Android.

So I know touch screen and stylus are technically two different topics but, any advice?

 

[ew9d]

Things I'd love to do:
pinch to zoom
use stylus to draw on top of live apps to highlight things I'm showing to someone
"mute" touch input around the top left and right inch of the screen so I can pick up the laptop. But still be able to use full touch screen when I'm not picking it up.

 

[nkukard]

I use Xournalpp for drawing, you can draw also open a PDF which is extremely useful for annotation, or create a blank page if you want to do sketching or drawing, it also supports pressure sensitivity.

In terms of the gestures, iirc it depends a lot on the application support (and the DE environment support), not everything supports all the gestures, at least the last time I looked. Some of the gestures also require multi-touch support for them to work. Most of the gestures I've found work at least for me on a Lenovo X1 Yoga in Xournalpp.

 

[Theros]

in terms of gfx tablets, pen inputs, etc and "drawing/art" i highly recommend krita, gimp is great... but combining krita and gimp i honestly believe you can do almost anything Photoshop can do (with a little more work)

I'm still on the hunt for a good tool similar to https://github.com/geovens/gInk for Linux, there are a few, but none seem "that great", i use gink on Windows continuously throughout my studies as a way to take notes, make diagrams etc while in various lectures, or while watching videos, that i can then screenshot and use as "slides" of both the content and my own notes.

 

[nkukard]

in terms of gfx tablets, pen inputs, etc and "drawing/art" i highly recommend krita, gimp is great... but combining krita and gimp i honestly believe you can do almost anything Photoshop can do (with a little more work)

I'm still on the hunt for a good tool similar to https://github.com/geovens/gInk for Linux, there are a few, but none seem "that great", i use gink on Windows continuously throughout my studies as a way to take notes, make diagrams etc while in various lectures, or while watching videos, that i can then screenshot and use as "slides" of both the content and my own notes.

Hrmmm, have you tried the latest Xournalpp? really looks pretty feature packed.

 

[Theros]

Hmm that actually looks pretty good. im trying to find something that features an overlay so i can write over "anything onscreen", but in general this looks real good for just note taking and such, will try this out thanks
(ohh it even has latex support and lua scripting for custom tooling)