Keyboard, mouse and touchpad
Hub → Input is where the hardware you type and point with is configured. It opens on Keyboard and grows tabs to match the machine: Touchpad appears only where there is one, Fingerprint only where there is a reader.
Two neighbours are deliberately elsewhere. Which key does what is Hub → Hotkeys, not this panel — see the desktop guide. The language of the interface itself is Hub → System → Language, described at the end of this page.
Keyboard layouts and the switch key
Layouts is an ordered ring. Add language appends to it, the ring's first entry is the one you get at the login screen, and the Switch key cycles through them.
The switch key is not an ordinary shortcut — it is a combination of modifiers alone, which the compositor cannot express as a binding, so it is set here rather than in Hotkeys. The offered choices are Alt+Shift (the default), Ctrl+Shift, Right Alt, Both Shifts, Ctrl+Space and Super+Space. The last three carry a warning, and it is worth reading: Right Alt is AltGr on many layouts and would swallow special-character input, Ctrl+Space is autocompletion in most editors and terminals, and Super+Space already opens the Hub.
Typing
- Key repeat rate — how many repeats per second a held key produces.
- Repeat delay — how long you must hold it before repeating starts.
- NumLock at login — applied when a keyboard is initialised, so it takes effect at your next login rather than right now.
From a terminal these are w-keyboard; w-keyboard status prints the current
ring, w-keyboard list the ~99 layouts available.
Mouse
- Speed and Acceleration — Adaptive speeds up with the movement, Flat keeps the ratio constant. Flat is what you want for anything where the distance you move should always mean the same thing on screen.
- Natural scrolling and Scroll speed.
- Left-handed (swap buttons).
Touchpad
The touchpad tab carries the settings that make a pad feel like yours:
- Touchpad enabled, Speed, Acceleration, Natural scrolling and Scroll speed — as on the mouse.
- Disable while typing — stops the heel of your hand from moving the cursor mid-sentence.
- Tap to click, and Two- / three-finger tap, which chooses whether two fingers mean right-click and three mean middle, or the other way round.
- Physical click — By area treats the bottom corners of the pad as buttons; By finger count decides from how many fingers rest on the pad, which is the behaviour most laptops ship with today.
- Middle-click emulation — pressing both buttons at once.
- Drag by tapping and Drag lock, which keeps a drag alive when you lift a finger briefly — with timeout releases it on its own, sticky waits for another tap.
- Multi-finger drag — drag with three or four fingers instead of pressing.
If the tab shows the pad but Speed, Acceleration and the on/off switch
do nothing, the session has not identified the device yet: run w-pointer detect once from a terminal inside the session. Those three are per-device
settings and need the pad's name; the rest are not.
Gestures
- Swipe to switch workspaces — off, or with three or four fingers.
- Natural swipe direction — which way the workspaces move under your fingers.
- Swiping past the last one creates a workspace.
Cursor timeouts
Two numbers, both in seconds, that hide the pointer when it is not being used —
0 means never:
- Hide when idle — system applies to the session as a whole.
- Hide when idle — menus applies only while the launcher, the Hub or the clipboard is open, so the pointer gets out of the way of keyboard navigation. While it is hidden the menu stops highlighting whatever it happens to rest on, which is the point: one selection instead of two. Any mouse movement brings both back.
From a terminal all of this is w-pointer: w-pointer status prints
everything, w-pointer keys lists every setting with its accepted values, and
w-pointer reset --all returns to the W defaults.
Fingerprint
Where the machine has a reader, the Fingerprint tab enrols one. Press Add, choose a finger, and swipe until the card says it is done. With at least one fingerprint enrolled, W's password dialog offers the reader as an alternative; deleting the last one turns that off again. The password always keeps working — see the security guide.
The interface language
The language W itself speaks is a system setting rather than a keyboard one, so it lives in Hub → System → Language and asks for your password. It applies to sessions started afterwards, so log out and back in to see it. Adding a layout to type in that language is the Keyboard tab above; the two are independent.
The list shows each language under its own name — «русский», 日本語, Deutsch —
with its locale code beside it. Searching matches either, so you can type рус
or ru_RU, whichever your current keyboard can produce.
After you switch, some things stay English for a while
Changing the language is instant and works with no network, which means it does not download anything. A few parts of the system need an extra package before they can speak your language — the Firefox interface, the spell checker, the translated manual pages. They arrive on the next system update, or immediately with:
sudo w-langpack applyw-langpack status says what is missing before you run it. Nothing is broken in
the meantime: anything without its language pack simply stays in English.
Your folders follow the language
The standard folders in your home — Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music,
Videos, Desktop — are created in your language at your first login, and the
programs find them by their role, not their name (a screenshot lands in the
Pictures folder whatever it is called). When you switch the language, they are
renamed at your next login: ~/Pictures becomes ~/Изображения, with
everything in it exactly where it was — a rename is all that happens, nothing is
copied, merged or deleted.
Two things are left alone on purpose. A folder you moved or renamed yourself
(xdg-user-dirs-update --set DOWNLOAD /path is the command; a file manager
does the same) is yours and keeps its name in every language. And if the new
name is already taken by a folder with files in it, both stay as they are —
w-userdirs status says so, and merging them is your call.
If you would rather keep the English names, the switch is right under the
language: Hub → System → Language → Folder names follow the language → No.
It is per user and needs no password. w-userdirs sync --dry-run previews what
the next login would rename.
What will not translate
Some of the terminal programs W ships have no translations at all — not missing
from W, absent from the programs themselves. The file lister (eza), the shell
history search (atuin), the editors (helix, micro), the file manager
(yazi) and the system monitor (btop) are English-only whatever your language
is. Their dates and numbers do follow your locale; only their own words do not.
So ls shows you Russian month names, but if you list a directory you may not
read, the refusal comes back in English — that message belongs to the program,
not to W.
W's own w- commands are a different case, and worth knowing the shape of:
their help is translated — w-<command> help, the w-info catalog, and the
whole command reference in this documentation. What stays English is what they
print while working: errors, status lines, progress. An English error under a
Russian help page is expected, not a half-finished translation.
For the same reason a Japanese or Chinese web page shows real characters rather than empty boxes: W installs full Unicode font coverage regardless of the language you picked.