LibreOffice has supported some input gestures in the past, such as the one based on the GTK front end.Swipe and long press, and additional features specific to Android and iOS. For now, it appears that this cross-platform open-source office suite is working on better gesture support.

According to LibreOffice’s Git submission records, some developers have recently submittedRotate and zoom gesturesinfrastructure. This infrastructure is being added to the LibreOffice Visual Class Library (VCL, Visual Class Library) so it can run in supported toolkits. Zoom gestures work in a uniform way across the GUI toolbox.

The developer described the patch as follows:

This change implements the internal infrastructure to pass zoom gestures from the underlying source code to GUI widgets. The API follows the established begin-update-update-…-end event convention used on various platforms.

As long as the underlying source code at the bottom of the architecture exposes enough information, the API should be sufficient to support touchpad and touchscreen gestures. Hardware drivers often expose recognized touchpad gestures, and a touchscreen gesture is a moving set of touch points that the application needs to figure out on its own. Many toolkits recognize both and provide a unified higher-level interface that can be used.

Rotation gestures are implemented similarly to zoom gestures under the hood, and are equally applicable to touchpad and touchscreen gestures.

LibreOffice 7.4 was released earlier this month and is still in the early stages of the next release cycle. I believe the next version will bring many updates in gesture support, among other features.