Map Wacom Tablet to a Single Display
How to map a graphics tablet to a single display in a multi-monitor setup in Linux
Wacom Intuos graphics tablet
I have a Wacom Intuos graphics tablet for my occasional drawing and signing. By default, the tablet area is mapped to the whole screen area, making it almost unusable if you are using two or more monitors, as your drawing application of choice (Krita in my case) usually resides in one display only.
Well, turns out there’s a very easy way to map the tablet to a single display in Linux with xinput. But first, we need to find out the display we want to map the table to with xrandr.
$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 7740 x 2160, maximum 32767 x 32767
DVI-D-0 connected 3840x2160+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 531mm x 299mm
1920x1080 60.00*+
1680x1050 59.95
1440x900 59.89
1280x1024 75.02 60.02
1280x720 60.00
1024x768 75.03 60.00
800x600 75.00 60.32
640x480 75.00 59.94
HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-2 connected primary 3840x2160+3900+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 527mm x 296mm
3840x2160 60.00*+ 29.98
2560x1440 59.95
2048x1280 59.96
1920x1200 59.88
1920x1080 60.00 60.00 59.94 50.00 23.98
1600x1200 60.00
1600x900 60.00
1280x1024 75.02 60.02
1280x720 60.00 59.94 50.00
1152x864 75.00
1024x768 75.03 60.00
800x600 75.00 60.32
720x576 50.00
720x480 59.94
640x480 75.00 59.94 59.93
DP-3 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
In my case, I have two displays. To the left, I use a 1080p Fujitsu connected via DVI (DVI-D-0). To the right, I have a 4K Dell connected via a display port (DP-2). Of course, I want to map the tablet to the 4K display to use the extra pixels.
Now, before actually doing the mapping with xinput, we need to find the identifiers of our Wacom device:
$ xinput | grep Wacom
⎜ ↳ Wacom Intuos BT S Pad id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom Intuos BT S Pen Pen (0x8880f16b) id=13 [slave pointer (2)]
↳ Wacom Intuos BT S Pen id=12 [slave keyboard (3)]
Here they are. The IDs are 11, 12 and 13, so let’s map them to DP-2:
xinput map-to-output 11 DP-2
xinput map-to-output 12 DP-2
xinput map-to-output 13 DP-2
And that’s it. Easy-peasy!