I looked at the settings for my wacom tablet for linux out of curiosity. To see if I could switch at all. In the process, I came up with a few important questions and issues that would limit me when switching to linux.
Is it not possible under linux for wacom tables to specify the mapped area on the monitor? so that my tablet is mapped only on a partial area for the monitor? So I could create two profiles and take one for more accuracy, which activates the stifft only in the area of the monitor where the canvas is. the other profile can then be switched with a button press if I need to access UI. (This is similar with the wacom driver via precision mode).
Is it not possible to set the speed in relative mode for the pen?
My wacom has a button in the middle of the touch wheel with which I can switch the function of the wheel and thus assign 4 functions. Is that also not possible?
Wacom touch works really well for macOS, no palm injection, you can deativate the mouse button by touch and unly use touch for canvas input very well. Is this not possible in linux? Is always the mouse klick activated?
I looked at this because apparently the new m1 macs are not really well supported by krita because of the lack of arm neon support and opengl problem. But the wacom driver for mac is very good in my opinion and there are other issues to switch to linux. Will the developers think about improving this for mac in the future? Maybe implement this arm neon and metal thing? @halla
The graphical settings window for wacom tablets is limited. You might find what you need in the commind line tool xsetwacom. I’ve made a little bash script with my settings, and you could easily create two different ones, basically giving you different profiles. Put them on your desktop so that you can just click them to run, or whatever you prefer.
All of this is possible on Linux, except maybe the speed in relative mode (i never used relative mode with a pen). Precision Mode could also be difficult. I just recently learned what that is, maybe it can be recreated somehow. Personally I never needed a feature like it (but that’s just my personal opinion of course). The possibilities of the UI depend a bit on the distro or the desktop used. KDE has a pretty good one. And you can interface with xsetwacom directly if you want to do crazy stuff giving you even more possibilities (i attached whole scripts to buttons)
You can easily test this by installing Linux to a USB stick, that’s possible with most Linuxes nowadays. That way you can simply try it without having to change anything on your current system.
As i said i tested it with an installation already. I have now read the manpage of xsetwacom and there is no possibility according to the manpage, that you can configure four different touch wheels and switch with the middle button between the four different ones (There is still only one touch wheel physically). The middle button is handled as a normal button, and not as a switch between the four different touch wheels settings. Also I don’t see a function with xsetwacom, with which you can map the tablet on a part of the monitor. Only that you can map a part of the tablet, but always to the entire monitor. Also not in the KDE Tablet settings. Could you please tell me where you have seen these settings @Takiro ? Thanks in advance.
Maybe it is the maptooutput setting about the mapping?
The mapping works with the maptooutput as long as i set it with xsetwacom, but if i want to use two profile and switch it with a button, the kde settings overwrite this maptooutput settings after a switch from profile one to profile two. Also not the solution. i Want two profies, one is mappet to the whole monitor, and the second is only mappet to a part of the monitor. And i want to switch it with a button. Aka the settings to switch profiles for tablet mappings and settings also overwrites all custom settings i did with xsetwacom.
The xsetwacom set "ID" Area right? I just tested here and you can map the entire tablet to a portion of the screen. The Area argument accepts negative values instead of the default 0,0 for the top left corner (x1, y1). This makes the top of your tablet reaching a inner portion of your screen.
For the bottom right conner just use values above the default ones for your tablet.
Example: An original setting like Area 0, 0, 100, 100 could be Area -40, -40, 150, 150
It is possible, I use it with the Wacom Remote. I didn’t configure it with the command line tool but with the GUI that came with my distro and KDE. I could just select the remote and configure it to my liking, (there is no default set up unfortunately) same with the buttons on my Intuos. However configuring the touch ring was kinda clunky and didn’t work as great, I have to admit. Switching the button profiles worked too. I’m not sure how to do it with xsetwacom but using the GUI made it pretty simple. I just mapped the buttons to the different Krita shortcuts and the middle one to switch profile.
I don’t have my Intuos ready and my remote is currently not configured but that is basically how I do it. As you can see, I configured the middle button to next profile shortcut.
This is the tablet area, not the screen area you see to adjust in the “Select a Tablet Area” in your last screenshot. I talk about Monitor Area and not Tablet Area. It looks like it is only possible with the maptooutput via xsetwacom, and as i said this setting is overwritten after you just change one small stuff in the kde tablet settings panel. Or if you just use the “Next Profile” shortcut. all is overwritten.
Ah sorry, I didn’t see it then. Yeah, then you are right. I’m not really sure it is even possible because of the way Linux or X11 to be precise, handles screens. You only use the whole thing or not. The same reason we still have no UI scaling per screen (only global). Sorry didn’t pay attention.
Reading through the xsetwacom documentation then it looks like MapToOutput is what you need but the option can not be set manually in the Wacom settings. The problem is that both are overwriting each others settings, so you either use the GUI tool or switch to a distro that doesn’t have the GUI tool, or maybe uninstalling it would be enough. The better approach would probably be to make a feature request at KDE so they put this in, maybe some day in the future, but that doesn’t help with your current situation of course.
As I first wrote, precision mode could be impossible, I bet the Wacom driver on Windows or MacOS also does a bit more than just simply limiting the output to a smaller screen area.
And touch support is weird too. Depending on which tablet I connect to my PC, Linux either uses the touch pad settings or the Wacom settings. I never really used it with my Intuos, always had it turned off.
Yes exaclty. Unfortunately it is useless for me to map the tablet to a smaller monitor area via xsetwacom if I could only use that profile. I would like to be able to switch between partial monitor area and full monitor area during the session very fast and often. As i do now with precision mode. The smaller monitor area is then for painting on canvas mapped how the canvas is positioned on my monitor. And then it is possible to also have a nice 1:1 proportion with only a 1,5x scale from my tablet to my monitor. And if i want to switch tho the whole monitor mapping for access other functions and stuff, i just had to push a button to change the profile. And apparently the profile switching is only available via kde settings, which then overwrites exactly my needed setting.
In your last screenshot, can’t you put negative and/or bigger values than your physical tablet? In the Tablet area fine tuning. Wouldn’t this be the same as setting the xsetwacom Area like I tested?
I don’t have a KDE environment so I can’t test it. Sorry if is a silly assumption.
Profile switching is possible with xsetwacom but you would have to map a button to a script that sets all the buttons and everything. It’s very tedious and not simple. Basically you are responsible to handle what a profile is and how to set it.
I would like to summarize only what the difference is, that all who read this later also understand.
xsetwacom “Area” setting, also that what you see in the kde settings to map = Size of the tablet that is active
xsetwacom “MaptoOutput” setting = The active tablet area, specified by the “Area” setting, is mapped to a part of the monitor, or if this is not specified, the whole monitor. Only availalbe via xsetwacom, and has nothing to do with the “Area” setting directly.
xsetwacom set “Devicename” Area x1 y1 x2 y2
Set the tablet input area in device coordinates in the form top left x/y and bottom right x/y.
xsetwacom set “Devicename” MapToOutput [output]
Map the tablet’s input area to a given output (e.g. “VGA1”). Output names may either be the name of a head available through the XRandR extension, or an X11 geometry string of the form WIDTHxHEIGHT+X+Y.
Thanks for clarifying, I obviously didn’t register that you can set a personalized X11 geometry. Less hacky and wonky than my solution, one could say it’s the proper way.
Now another question as I can’t test a Wacom + KDE myself. Do you have to change profiles to use two different tablet to screen size? Don’t a shell script (.sh) with the xsetwacom command bound to a button suffice?
Not two different tablet. I want to change a profile for one tablet. One Profile that is mapped to a smaller part of the screen. The other profile that is mapped to the full screen. Honestly i don’t know how to write a .sh script that is mapped to a shortcut or a tablet button with all this options.
