Hi everyone, I’m just starting out with Flutter development and could really use some help.
I want to create a scrollable area where users can move around in all directions - up, down, left, right, and diagonally too. Think of apps like design tools where you have a big canvas and can pan around freely to see different parts of your work.
I’m not asking for complete code examples, just pointing me toward the right widgets or approaches I should look into. What components does Flutter offer for this kind of multi-directional scrolling?
I haven’t written any code yet because I’m not sure which direction to go with this. Any suggestions on the best way to get started would be awesome!
check out InteractiveViewer! it’s perfect for 2D scrolling and makes panning/zooming super easy. trust me, it’s way less of a headache than using nested ScrollViews - those can get messy with all the gestures.
I’ve built this exact thing with CustomScrollView and two perpendicular scrollable widgets. Set up a custom gesture detector to catch pan gestures, then translate those into scroll offsets for both axes at once. You’ll need scroll controllers for each direction and sync their movements based on drag input. The tricky part is nailing the gesture recognition - diagonal scrolling should feel smooth, not choppy. I spent time tweaking the scroll physics and adding proper bounds checking to avoid that annoying snap behavior you get with basic setups. More work than simple solutions, but you get full control over how scrolling behaves.
You’ll want SingleChildScrollView with both horizontal and vertical scrolling. Set the outer one to Axis.vertical and wrap your content in another SingleChildScrollView with Axis.horizontal. This creates that canvas feel where users can scroll any direction. I used this exact setup for a photo editing app where people needed to navigate around large images. Just make sure your content widget is bigger than the viewport - otherwise there’s nothing to scroll through. Throw in BouncingScrollPhysics too for that natural bounce when users hit the edges.
honestly, just wrap your content in a GestureDetector and handle the pan updates yourself. way more flexible than trying to hack together ScrollViews that don’t play nice with each other.