Gesture animation

Motion extends React's basic set of event listeners with a simple yet powerful set of UI gestures.

The motion component currently has support for hover, tap, pan, drag, focus and inView.

Each gesture has both a set of event listeners and a while- animation prop.

Animation props

motion components provide multiple gesture animation props: whileHover, whileTap, whileFocus, whileDrag and whileInView. These can define animation targets to temporarily animate to while a gesture is active.

<motion.button
  whileHover={{
    scale: 1.2,
    transition: { duration: 1 },
  }}
  whileTap={{ scale: 0.9 }}
/>

All props can be set either as a target of values to animate to, or the name of any variants defined via the variants prop. Variants will flow down through children as normal.

<motion.button
  whileTap="tap"
  whileHover="hover"
  variants={buttonVariants}
>
  <svg>
    <motion.path variants={iconVariants} />
  </svg>
</motion.button>

Gestures

Hover

The hover gesture detects when a pointer hovers over or leaves a component. Learn more about hover animations.

<motion.a
  whileHover={{ scale: 1.2 }}
  onHoverStart={event => {}}
  onHoverEnd={event => {}}
/>

Tap

The tap gesture detects when the primary pointer (like a left click or first touch point) presses down and releases on the same component.

<motion.button whileTap={{ scale: 0.9, rotate: 3 }} />

It will fire a tap event when the tap or click ends on the same component it started on, and a tapCancel event if the tap or click ends outside the component.

If the tappable component is a child of a draggable component, it'll automatically cancel the tap gesture if the pointer moves further than 3 pixels during the gesture.

Accessibility

Elements with tap events are keyboard-accessible.

Any element with a tap prop will be able to receive focus and Enter can be used to trigger tap events on focused elements.

• Pressing Enter down will trigger onTapStart and whileTap

• Releasing Enter will trigger onTap

• If the element loses focus before Enter is released, onTapCancel will fire.

Pan

The pan gesture recognises when a pointer presses down on a component and moves further than 3 pixels. The pan gesture is ended when the pointer is released.

<motion.div onPan={(e, pointInfo) => {}} />

Pan doesn't currently have an associated while- prop.

Note: For pan gestures to work correctly with touch input, the element needs touch scrolling to be disabled on either x/y or both axis with the touch-action CSS rule.

Drag

The drag gesture applies pointer movement to the x and/or y axis of the component.

<motion.div drag whileDrag={{ scale: 1.2, backgroundColor: "#f00" }} />

Learn more about drag animations.

Focus

The focus gesture detects when a component gains or loses focus by the same rules as the CSS :focus-visible selector.

Typically, this is when an input receives focus by any means, and when other elements receive focus by accessible means (like via keyboard navigation).

<motion.a whileFocus={{ scale: 1.2 }} href="#" />

Event propagation

Children can stop pointer events propagating to parent motion components using the Capture React props.

For instance, a child can stop drag and tap gestures and their related while animations from firing on parents by passing e.stopPropagation() to onPointerDownCapture.

<motion.div whileTap={{ scale: 2 }}>
  <button onPointerDownCapture={e => e.stopPropagation()} />
</motion.div>

Note: SVG filters

Gestures aren't recognised on SVG filter components, as these elements don't have a physical presence and therefore don't receive events.

You can instead add while- props and event handlers to a parent and use variants to animate these elements.

const MyComponent = () => {
  return (
    <motion.svg whileHover="hover">
      <filter id="blur">
        <motion.feGaussianBlur
          stdDeviation={0}
          variants={{ hover: { stdDeviation: 2 } }}
        />
      </filter>
    </motion.svg>
  )
}