Sway: [enhancement] Add mouse sensitivity setting

[Alphare]

This is a very similar issue to #3004.

Right now we have the ability to enable and disable mouse acceleration, but no setting for mouse sensitivity. Sensitivity in sway is lower than in my other distros/OSes, and it's been bugging me.

Depending on my schedule I might give it a try this week-end. Considering how similar the code will be to #3004, this should not be very hard to implement, unless there is something I'm overlooking.

[progandy]

Wouldn't that be possible already by setting the "flat" acceleration profile and then setting a factor between -1 and 1? Or the calibration matrix may be another alternative.

[Alphare]

@progandy Mhhh, that might be it yeah. This libinput docs paragraph seems to indicate that you can indeed keep a 1:1 ratio and have a factor. Now, whether that factor is wide enough is another question. I'm not on my machine right now, I'll test that later .
Moreover, my initial issue with inconsistent default sens (read: DPI settings) might be something in udev unrelated to sway.
I'll check back soon, thanks.

[L-as]

I found this.

TL;DR: 0 is the default, -1 is the minimum possible speed, and 1 is the maximum possible speed.

One thing that confuses me is how can there be a maximum and minimum speed? Does libinput perhaps pass this number to the device itself? In any case, it works well enough for me, but higher limits would be nice.

[artizirk]

Correct mouse DPI setting in 70-mouse.hwdb file helps quite a lot

• http://who-t.blogspot.com/2014/12/building-a-dpi-database-for-mice.html
• https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/pointer-acceleration.html

[jparsert]

Is there a way now to change the mouse sensitivity in sway?

[luzidd]

I'm also interested if this is planned.

[zerfix]

to change sensitivity, add to sway config:

input <your device identifier> {
    accel_profile <flat or adaptive>
    pointer_accel <between -1.0 and 1.0>
}

as identifier you can use type:pointer, type:touchpad or use swaymsg -t get_inputs to find your input device

[JSquar]

For me, pointer_accel 1 is still too slow for me. Therefore I tried to influence the pointer's transformation matrix by setting calibration_matrix 2 0 0 0 2 0. But I didn't notice any difference...is there any solution to this?

[cauebs]

The workaround proposed is not enough, because some may want to keep the adaptive behaviour and still alter the overall pointer speed factor.

[luzidd]

I have a suggestion for making the configuration syntax for this feature more intuitive.

# this is a little redundant if one would set the sensitivity setting to zero, it might just be easier to have this anyway for convenience'
input <identifier> adaptive true|false

# describes the slope of the sensitivity/raw_pointer_speed curve
# sensitivity would be on the y axis while pointer input speed is on the x axis                               
# a value of 0 would have the same effect as "adaptive false"
input <identifier> sensitivity [-x..x] 
# alternative names could be "adaptive_sensitivity" or "sensitivity_curve/ramp"

# multiplies the distance traveled (per frame) by this factor
# a negative setting would make the cursor move in the opposite direction
input <identifier> speed [-x..x]

Also there is a video that shows a good example of how an acceleration curve could be customized and what the benefits might be:
(https://youtu.be/SBXv0xi-wyQ?t=230)

[distek]

Just a note, and possibly the solution to some of your issues:

Despite swaymsg -t get_inputs printing the identifier with escaped characters like so:

"identifier": "2:10:TPPS\/2_Elan_TrackPoint",

Make sure that when you add it to your configuration, you remove the escapes:

input "2:10:TPPS/2_Elan_TrackPoint" {
    accel_profile "flat"
    pointer_accel -0.3
}

Also, another note, if you specify the same input device twice ( for example ), the second setting will override the first setting and set it back to default:

input "2:10:TPPS/2_Elan_TrackPoint" accel_profile "flat"
input "2:10:TPPS/2_Elan_TrackPoint" pointer_accel -0.3

This will set accel_profile back to adaptive and then the pointer_accel to -0.3

Forgot to add: So specify multiple settings the way I showed above with:

input [device] {
    option val
}