Gestures

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

The motion component currently has support for hover, press, pan, drag 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, whilePress, 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 },
  }"
  :whilePress="{ 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
  whilePress="press"
  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.

It differs from onMouseEnter and onMouseLeave in that hover is guaranteed to only fire as a result of actual mouse events (as opposed to browser-generated mice events emulated from touch input).

<motion.a
  :whileHover="{ scale: 1.2 }"
  @hoverStart="event => {}"
  @hoverEnd="event => {}"

Press

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

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

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

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

Accessibility

Elements with press events are keyboard-accessible.

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

• Pressing Enter down will trigger onPressStart and whilePress

• Releasing Enter will trigger onPress

• If the element loses focus before Enter is released, onPressCancel 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 @pan="(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' }" />

By default, when the drag ends the element will perform an inertia animation with the ending velocity.

This can be disabled by setting dragMomentum to false, or changed via the dragTransition prop.

Constraints

It's also possible to set dragConstraints, either as an object with top, left, right, and bottom values, measured in pixels.

<motion.div
  drag="x"
  :dragConstraints="{ left: 0, right: 300 }"
/>

Or, it can accept an HTMLElement ref value. You can get the component's DOM ref value using useDomRef from motion-v, and pass it both to the draggable component's dragConstraints prop and the ref of the component you want to use as constraints.

<script setup>
  import { useDomRef } from "motion-v"
  const constraintsRef = useDomRef()
</script>
<template>
  <motion.div ref="constraintsRef">
      <motion.div drag :dragConstraints="constraintsRef" />
  </motion.div>
</template>

By default, dragging the element outside the constraints will tug with some elasticity. This can be changed by setting dragElastic to a value between 0 and 1, where 0 equals no motion and 1 equals full motion outside the constraints.

Direction locking

It's possible to lock an element to the first axis it's dragged on by setting dragDirectionLock.

<motion.div
  drag
  dragDirectionLock
  @directionLock="callback"
/>

Each time the drag gesture starts, the direction of pointer travel will be detected and the element will be draggable only on this axis.

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 Vue 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 :whilePress="{ scale: 2 }">
  <button @pointerDownCapture="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.

<template>
    <motion.svg whileHover="hover">
      <filter id="blur">
        <motion.feGaussianBlur
          :stdDeviation="0"
          :variants="{ hover: { stdDeviation: 2 } }"
        />
      </filter>
    </motion.svg>
</template>

Motion+ examples

Motion+ is a one-time payment, lifetime membership that gains you access to the source code of an ever-growing library of premium examples, as well as premium components like Cursor and AnimateNumber.

It features a number of examples involving gestures, including: