WineTab

A patched build of XWinTab that fixes tablet pressure and pen input for Adobe Photoshop (tested with Photoshop 2020) running under Wine on Linux.

What this fixes

Wine's own builtin wintab32.dll doesn't stream continuous pen motion (curvy strokes render as straight lines) and doesn't report real pressure data at all. This build:

• Streams full motion + pressure + tilt data properly
• Doesn't draw a stray straight line from the canvas corner at the start of every stroke
• Doesn't stop responding to the pen after alt-tabbing to/from a fullscreen app

See STATUS.md for the full technical writeup of each bug and how it was found/fixed.

Credits

• XWinTab by Graham--M — the base Wintab-over-XInput implementation this is built on.
• Pressure-axis fix (WTI_DEVICES AXIS/mask handling), ordinal exports, and several crash fixes from gurppt/flashcs6linux_deploy (xwintab/PATCHES.md), originally written for Adobe Flash/Animate CS6.
• The stroke-start position bug fix and the XInput2 event-delivery rewrite (fixing the alt-tab/fullscreen stall) are new in this repo.

Same license as upstream XWinTab: MIT (see build64/LICENSE).

Requirements

• Linux with X11 or Xwayland (this uses XInput2 directly via libxcb)
• libxcb, libxcb-xinput (present on basically any modern desktop distro)
• A Wacom-compatible tablet whose XInput device name contains "stylus"
• Wine — wine-10.4-staging-tkg-amd64 is recommended (it tested clean; some newer Wine builds have an unrelated graphics-backend freezing bug, and some much older ones crash Photoshop outright — see the Wine version table in STATUS.md for details)

Building

Prebuilt binaries are attached to the Releases page if you'd rather skip building it yourself.

Needs mingw-w64-gcc (or x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc) and winegcc:

cd build64
winegcc -o XWinTabHelper.dll.so -shared -O2 XWinTabHelper.c XWinTabHelper.dll.spec -lxcb -lxcb-xinput
x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc -shared -O2 -o wintab32.dll WinTab.c wintab32.def

This produces two files: wintab32.dll (the actual Windows-side Wintab DLL) and XWinTabHelper.dll.so (a native Linux ELF helper that it calls into for the X11/XInput2 side). Loading a native .so from a Windows DLL like this is a normal Wine technique, not something exotic — see CODEBASE-WALKTHROUGH.md for more on how it works.

Installing

1. Copy both wintab32.dll and XWinTabHelper.dll.so into the app's own install directory (e.g. next to Photoshop.exe), not system32. Windows/Wine's DLL search order checks the app directory before system32, so putting the files there is what actually makes them take effect, and it avoids clobbering anything else in the same prefix that also uses wintab32.dll.
2. Tell Wine to prefer this real file over its own builtin stub:

   WINEPREFIX=/path/to/your/prefix wine reg add \
     "HKCU\Software\Wine\DllOverrides" /v wintab32 /t REG_SZ /d native /f

   This is a one-time step: the setting is stored in the prefix and persists across launches and Wine version changes.
3. Make sure Photoshop is configured to use Wintab rather than Windows' native pointer/Ink API. Find (or create) PSUserConfig.txt at drive_c/users/<name>/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop <version>/Adobe Photoshop <version> Settings/PSUserConfig.txt inside the prefix, and make sure it contains:

   UseSystemStylus 0
   

   Without this, Photoshop may try Windows' native stylus/Ink API first, which Wine doesn't implement, silently bypassing Wintab (and this fix) regardless of everything else being installed correctly.
4. Launch the app normally. In Lutris, just make sure the game's Wine version is set to a working runner (see Requirements above); no special environment variables are needed for daily use.

Debug logging (optional)

Set XWINTAB_LOG=1 before launching to get a verbose trace at %USERPROFILE%\XWinTabLog.txt inside the prefix (e.g. drive_c/users/<name>/XWinTabLog.txt). This is useful if pressure or motion still doesn't behave right on your setup and you want to see what Wintab calls the app is actually making.

Known limitations

• Only one Wintab context is supported at a time. WTOverlap is a no-op stub, which is fine because Photoshop only ever opens a single context.
• Proximity in/out (hover detection, used for brush-preview cursors) is synthesized from motion/button activity and a short idle timeout, rather than reported natively, because XInput2 raw events have no distinct proximity event type of their own. It should feel right in practice, but it isn't a byte-for-byte protocol match to real Wintab.
• This has only been tested against Photoshop 2020. Other Wintab-consuming apps (Illustrator, Krita, etc.) haven't been verified. The fix should apply to them generically, but device- and driver-specific quirks are untested.

See also

If you're running Clip Studio Paint under Wine instead of (or alongside) Photoshop, check out CSPenguin-Installer — a solid install script for getting Clip Studio Paint working on Linux.