I’m just starting with Flutter development and need help with creating a scrollable canvas
I want to build something similar to design applications where users can scroll in all directions - up, down, left, right, and diagonally. Think of apps like Canva or Sketch where you have an infinite canvas that moves smoothly in any direction.
I’m not looking for complete code examples, just need to understand:
Which Flutter widgets would be best for this?
What’s the general approach or logic behind implementing this?
Are there any specific controllers or gestures I should focus on?
I haven’t started coding yet because I’m not sure about the right approach. Any guidance on the architecture or widget combinations would be really helpful.
InteractiveViewer is what you want - it handles multi-directional scrolling without any complex gesture work. I built a similar canvas interface last year and this widget saved me weeks. Just wrap your canvas content with InteractiveViewer and you get panning, zooming, and smooth scrolling in all directions automatically. It has its own transformation controller you can access if needed. For large canvases, use CustomPainter instead of building complex widget trees - way better performance. InteractiveViewer handles boundary detection and momentum scrolling out of the box, so no manual gesture recognizers needed. Start with a basic setup and expand from there - the API’s straightforward and well documented.