Exploring Flutter Gestures

Flutter, the modern UI toolkit by Google, offers unparalleled flexibility in building cross-platform apps. Two core features—routing and gestures—play a critical role in crafting smooth and intuitive user experiences. In this blog, we’ll explore how to efficiently manage navigation (routing) and handle user interactions (gestures) in Flutter.

Gestures are interactions that are used with an application. It is used to physically interact with the application. It can be as simple as a single tap on the screen to a more complex physical interaction like swiping in a specific direction to scrolling down an application. This feature is widely used in games and nearly every application is using it as devices turn more touch-based than ever. We will discuss these here in detail.

Important and commonly used navigation in flutter :-

1: Routing in Flutter

Routing is the navigation between screens of a Flutter application. Flutter uses several approaches to implement navigation, from the simple Navigator to the much more powerful Navigator 2.0.

Basic Navigation with Navigator

• Navigator is basically the core of navigation in Flutter. For example, how to change between two pages:
   

2: Important Methods:

• Navigator.push(context, route); Pushes a new route to the stack.
• Navigator.pop(context); Pops the top-most route from the stack.

Named Routes

Named routes make navigation more readable and manageable, especially for larger apps.

Navigator 2.0 introduces declarative routing, which is ideal for apps that have complex navigation needs. This provides better control over route history and deep linking. 

Some widely used gestures are mentioned here :

• Tap: Touching the surface of the device with the fingertip for a small duration of time period and finally releasing the fingertip. Double Tap: Tapping twice in a short time.
• Drag: Touching the device surface with the fingertip and then moving the fingertip steadily and finally releasing the fingertip. Flick: Just like dragging but in a faster manner.
• Pinch: Using two fingers to pinch the device surface.
• Zoom: It is the opposite of pinching.
• Panning: Touching the device surface with the fingertip and moving it in the desired direction without releasing the fingertip.

The GestureDetector widget in flutter is utilized to identify the physical interaction of an application with the UI. In case a widget needs to encounter any gesture, then it must be put inside the GestureDetector widget. The same widget catches the gesture and responds by sending the proper action or reaction.

Flutter has widgets which do specific as well as complex gestures. The following widgets are included here:

• Dismissable: Support fling gesture to dismiss the widget.
• Draggable: It supports drag gesture to make the widget mobile
• LongPressDraggable: If the parent widgets are draggable, it supports drag to move the children widget.
• DragTarget: Accepts any kind of Draggable widget
• IgnorePointer: Used in its place, hides the widget and its corresponding children from gesture detection process.
• AbsorbPointer: Absorb the gesture detection process so that no action will dispatch in case of overlapping widgets.
• Scrollable: Make the content available inside the widget scrollable.