This post is meant to collect my experiences with my new Wacom Cintiq graphics tablet in Ubuntu and document the current state of my configuration for posterity so that it may help others. It contains my Express Keys setup for Krita.
Setup
The documentation leaflets provided by Wacom seemed suboptimal to me. It was some IKEA style no-words-only-pictures thing that did not make quite clear to me which part was which.
In the end, I just decided to plug it in like it seemed right. And after connection power, HDMI plug and the USB-C cable for the input devices the whole thing worked perfectly. Graphics tablet was recognized with the right resolution, its own color profile and everything. I just needed to tell Ubuntu that his monitor is supposed to be below my normal one. I also had deactivated the key combinations to move windows between monitors in my Ubuntu configuration, because I never needed it and thus had to restore that.
Express-Keys Configuration
At first I was disappointed that the pinch zoom gesture worked out-of-the-box in Krita, but I couldn’t get a multi-touch rotation bound to Krita’s canvas rotation.
Krita already very wisely prevents you from accidentally touch-painting on your graphics tablet. But in the end, the few times where it was nice to select tools with the non-dominant hand seemed not to worth it compared to the many times I inadvertently activated other parts of the UI like tool selections or the scroll bars. So I disabled touch for the graphics tablet.
My goal was to have the most common functionality I need for my paint workflow on the Express keys so that I can work without keyboard for larger stretches without moving between pen/express keys and keyboard/mouse operation too much.
The touch wheel does the canvas rotation and the mode-switch in the center just does a reset, which is a combination of resetting canvas rotation, resetting zoom and setting the tool to “Brush”.
Ring left and right are undo and redo, Ring down resets zoom only.
The left/right button pairs below the ring control brush size, opacity and brightness. The last two are less important to my paint workflow, but they are still useful sometimes and I have enough buttons.
The left/right pair on the bottom are pure modifier keys. Pressing control while in Brush mode activates the (mixing) color picker, but there’s a lot of functionality where ctrl and shift are modifiers in Krita.
The commands to set up this configuration are as follows:
#!/usr/bin/bash
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Touch on
# experimental total touch prevention
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Cintiq Pro 32 Touch Finger touch" Touch off
# settings for krita (with some extra key configuration there)
# zoom (ctrl +/-) (not in diagram)
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 12 "key ctrl plus"
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 15 "key ctrl minus"
# rotation over touch wheel (ctrl ö/ä)
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" AbsWheelUp "key ctrl 0xd6"
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" AbsWheelDown "key ctrl 0xe4"
# wheel button left/right for undo/redo
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 2 "key ctrl z"
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 9 "key ctrl shift z"
# Mode resets rotation and tool to brush and zoom (no modes yet)
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 1 "key 5 b 1"
# wheel down: reset zoom only
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 10 "key 1"
# 1st row: Brush size ö/ä
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 11 "key +0xd6"
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 13 "key +0xe4"
# 2nd row: opacity
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 14 "key +i"
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 16 "key +o"
# 3rd row: color brightness
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 17 "key +k"
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 19 "key +l"
# bottom buttons: ctrl + shift
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 21 "key +ctrl"
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Express Key Remote Pad pad" Button 22 "key +shift"Code language: PHP (php)As you can see, I put some functionality on the “ö” and “ä” keys that come with my German keyboard and which are always useful keys because they’re almost always free in the default key bindings.
Without a German keyboard, you obviously want other combos there. I think the ö/ä combos here are also the ones where I configured the extra key configuration in Krita to have them. All others are default keys I think.
The source code contains two zoom combos that are not in the diagram and which I might remove completely. I mostly try to work at 1:1 resolution on the graphics tablet anyway and rarely zoom in for details — and there’s always mouse wheel zoom.
Update: In the end I decided to buy the Wacom Flex arm which kind of made all this superfluous. Now I tend to just move the pad into a vertical-ish position slightly to the right so I can rotate my chair and work and have my full keyboard accessible on the left.