Linux: Easily change screen orientation

My notebook is a convertible and also has a stylus as input. When using the pen, I like to use the laptop screen in portrait format instead of landscape. Then the screen format is more similar to A4 paper, which helps a lot if you're taking hand-written notes on PDFs. Here's how to easily change the screen orientation via script.

xrandr is a linux command line tool for managing screen output (e.g. size, orientation).

Set the screen direction with xrandr --orientation <normal, inverted, left or right>

e.g.

Copyxrandr --orientation left`

Short notation is -o:
xrandr -o left

Here's a small bash script to toggle the screen orientation between normal and left.

Note

eDP-1 in the script is the identifier of my notebook screen and you probably have to replace that with you own screen's identifier (you can get that e.g. with xrandr --listmonitors)

Copy#!/bin/bash

orientation=`xrandr --query --verbose | grep eDP-1 | awk '{ print $6; }'`

if [ $orientation = 'normal' ]; then
    `xrandr --orientation left`
else
    `xrandr --orientation normal`
fi

You may add a keyboard shortcut that runs the script. Super+R (like "rotate") works well for me.

If you're using a touchpad, rotating the screen will not rotate the input from the touchpad, which makes it hard to use.
Here's a variant of the script which also configures the touchpad via xinput to match the rotation of the screen.

Note

You will have to replace the device name with your device's name which you can find out with xinput list.

Copy#!/bin/bash

orientation=`xrandr --query --verbose | grep eDP-1 | awk '{ print $6; }'`

if [ $orientation = 'normal' ]; then
    `xrandr --orientation left`
    `xinput set-prop "MSFT0001:00 06CB:CD3E Touchpad" --type=float "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 0 -1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1`
else
    `xrandr --orientation normal`
    `xinput set-prop "MSFT0001:00 06CB:CD3E Touchpad" --type=float "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1`
fi