Prototype: Wayland Scroll Factor (WSF) — per-user touchpad scroll + pinch tuning for GNOME Wayland (seeking feedback & upstream guidance)

Hi everyone,

I’ve been following the ongoing discussions about adding a touchpad scroll sensitivity control to GNOME, and I understand why this has been difficult to land cleanly (especially the need to keep smooth touchpad scrolling separate from discrete wheel events to avoid regressions).

As a practical stop-gap, I’ve built a small project called Wayland Scroll Factor (WSF). It’s a GUI + CLI tool that lets you tune touchpad gesture “feel” on GNOME Wayland, with separate control for:

  • two-finger scroll speed (vertical and horizontal),

  • pinch-to-zoom sensitivity,

  • pinch-rotate sensitivity.

The project is still alpha/testing, but on my Framework 13 + Arch + GNOME Wayland it’s been a big usability improvement.

Repo:

Quick install (bootstrap script, feel free to inspect it first):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/daniel-g-c-carrasco/wayland-scroll-factor/main/scripts/bootstrap.sh | bash

The script attempts to:

  • install dependencies via the distro package manager,

  • clone the repo,

  • run a per-user install.

A key goal of WSF is being safer than older global workarounds: it’s per-user and reversible (no /etc/ld.so.preload), scoped so it only affects the relevant process, and it avoids changing discrete wheel behavior.

I’m posting here for two reasons:

  1. to get broader testing feedback across distros/GNOME versions, and

  2. to ask for upstream guidance: if/when GNOME decides to expose this natively in Settings, what would be the cleanest integration point (Mutter/GSettings/API surface), and what constraints should a future implementation respect?

Thanks for any feedback (or pointers to the best place to coordinate).
Daniel