Touchscreen

Hello, I was wondering is touchscreen still not really supported? Seems like a dream to have a huge screen and touch for VCV rack.

Thanks, Steve

2 Likes

Yes, touch, trackpad, graphics tablet touch are all still unsupported.

When first looking at Rack, and looked further into this issue, I found it was because Rack relies on an external dependency for input, and that dependency doesn’t support touch/multitouch. When I looked at the dependency’s issues list, they said they wouldn’t support it because not all platforms support it (in particular: Mac). Despite the fact that there was a tested PR to enable it (for Windows, at least), but they refused to accept it for the xplat uniformity concern.

I heard that Tim Cook was considering touch for future Macs - a departure from Job’s stand that touch isn’t interesting on a laptop - but that has not materialized yet AFAIK. If that ever happens, then perhaps this might see the light of day.

2 Likes

I love the touchscreen on my 12.9" iPad Pro, but I usually use an Apple Pencil rather than my finger. That iPad is MIDI/USB/BLUETOOTH/WIFI integrated into my studio setup and is an extremely powerful controller surface. Recently I got it working again as a MIDI controller with VCV Rack on my Windows PC.

But of course VCV Rack does not work with iOS (yet?). There is another Rack that works fine with iOS.

Recently I tested a touchscreen on Windows 10. Especially turning a knob on the touchscreen didn’t work as expected. The knob always turned from one ent to the other, it was not possible to set the knob in a position between.

2 Likes

Per the Rack docs, did you adjust the Lock cursor while dragging setting?

Using either touch or pen with Rack on my otherwise wonderful Wacom tablet is a poor experience. Very disappointing – the Wacom supports 10-point multitouch, which would be awesome in VCV. It would be awesome to use my Surface Book or my wife’s old Surface 3 in tablet mode, but VCV is just not usable this way.

Edit: I’ve adjusted the Wacom tablet settings and getting some slightly better results now. 3-finger drag works fine for changing a knob (didn’t require changes), and adding two-finger “add tap to click” enables dragging knobs and sliders using that gesture. I couldn’t get single tap-drag to work, but that’s not just VCV.

I find this a lot in open source software. I blame it on the prevalence of MacBook laptops in the dev community. If MacBooks had touch screens, I think you’d see much more common touch support. It’s a case of “doesn’t work on my computer” (the opposite of “works on my computer”).

The lack of ability to naturally twist two knobs independently at once is a departure from the mission to emulate a physical modular system. Certainly hurts the performance aspect.

Thanks for your hint! Disabling lock cursor while dragging and setting knob mode to relative rotary helped a lot.

3 Likes

Any chance theres some wonderful code wizard out there trying to make a mac touch screen helper for v2?

1 Like