I’m trying to figure out how to create a canvas-like scrolling experience in my Flutter app. What I want is the ability to scroll in all directions - up, down, left, right, and even diagonally at the same time.
Think of apps like design platforms where you can pan around a large workspace in any direction. That’s exactly the behavior I’m aiming for in my app’s main content area.
I’m not looking for complete code solutions right now, just some direction on:
Which Flutter widgets would be best for this
What approach or pattern should I follow
Any specific considerations for handling multi-directional scrolling
Since I’m still learning, I haven’t written any code yet because I want to understand the right approach first. Any guidance would be really helpful!
I’ve actually implemented something similar for a floor plan viewer app I worked on last year. The key is understanding that you need a widget that can handle both horizontal and vertical scrolling simultaneously, which standard ScrollView widgets can’t do on their own. The most straightforward approach is using the InteractiveViewer widget. It’s specifically designed for this kind of pan-and-zoom functionality and handles multi-directional scrolling out of the box. You wrap your content in it and get automatic gesture recognition for panning in any direction. If you need more control over the scrolling behavior, you can build a custom solution using GestureDetector with onPanUpdate callbacks. This lets you manually handle the pan gestures and update your content’s position accordingly. You’d typically use a Transform widget to apply the translations. One thing to keep in mind is performance - if your canvas content is large, make sure to implement some form of viewport culling so you’re not rendering everything at once. Also consider how you’ll handle boundaries if your workspace has limits.
honestly InteractiveViewer is probaly your best bet for starting out. i used it in a map-like app and it works pretty well for basic panning. just be carefull with the boundaryMargin property - took me ages to figure out why my scrolling felt weird until i tweaked that setting properly.
From a performance perspective, I’d strongly recommend starting with InteractiveViewer but also planning for optimization early on. When I built a similar interface for a whiteboard app, the biggest challenge wasn’t the scrolling mechanism itself but managing what gets rendered as users pan around large canvases. You’ll want to implement viewport-based rendering where only visible elements are actually drawn. The other consideration is gesture conflicts - if your canvas contains interactive elements, you’ll need to carefully handle when pan gestures should move the canvas versus interact with content. I ended up using a combination of InteractiveViewer for the base functionality and custom GestureDetector logic for handling edge cases. Also worth noting that InteractiveViewer has built-in momentum scrolling which gives that native feel users expect from design tools.