Usually, dragging is initiated by pressing down on a motion component with a drag prop and then moving the pointer.

For some use-cases, for example clicking at an arbitrary point on a video scrubber, we might want to initiate that dragging from a different element.

With useDragControls, we can create a set of controls to manually start dragging from any pointer event.

Usage

Import useDragControls from Motion:

import { useDragControls } from "motion/react"

useDragControls returns drag controls that can be passed to a draggable motion component:

const controls = useDragControls()

return <motion.div drag dragControls={controls} />

Now we can start a drag session from another any element's onPointerDown event via the start method.

<div onPointerDown={event => controls.start(event)} />

Touch support

To support touch screens, the triggering element should have the touch-action: none style applied.

<div onPointerDown={startDrag} style={{ touchAction: "none" }} />

Snap to cursor

By default, the drag gesture will only apply changes to the pointer position.

We can also make the motion component immediately snap to the cursor by passing snapToCursor: true to the start method.

controls.start(event, { snapToCursor: true })

Disable automatic drag

With this configuration, the motion component will still automatically start a drag gesture when it receives a pointerdown event itself.

We can stop this behaviour by passing it a dragListener={false} prop.

<motion.div
  drag
  dragListener={false}
  dragControls={controls}
/>