Bind mouse and touch events to any React component

@use-gesture

Bread n butter utility for component-tied mouse/touch gestures in React

@use-gesture is a library that let you bind richer mouse and touch events to any component or view. With the data you receive, it becomes trivial to set up gestures, and often takes no more than a few lines of code.

You can use it stand-alone, but to make the most of it you should combine it with an animation library like react-spring, though you can most certainly use any other.

The demos are real click them!

Installation

React

#Yarn
yarn add @use-gesture/react

#NPM
npm install @use-gesture/react

Vanilla javascript

#Yarn
yarn add @use-gesture/vanilla

#NPM
npm install @use-gesture/vanilla

Simple example

React
import { useSpring, animated } from '@react-spring/web'
import { useDrag } from '@use-gesture/react'

function Example() {
  const [{ x, y }, api] = useSpring(() => ({ x: 0, y: 0 }))

  // Set the drag hook and define component movement based on gesture data
  const bind = useDrag(({ down, movement: [mx, my] }) => {
    api.start({ x: down ? mx : 0, y: down ? my : 0 })
  })

  // Bind it to a component
  return <animated.div {...bind()} style={{ x, y, touchAction: 'none' }} />
}
Vanilla javascript
<!-- index.html -->
<div id="drag" />
// script.js
const el = document.getElementById('drag')
const gesture = new DragGesture(el, ({ active, movement: [mx, my] }) => {
  setActive(active)
  anime({
    targets: el,
    translateX: active ? mx : 0,
    translateY: active ? my : 0,
    duration: active ? 0 : 1000
  })
})

// when you want to remove the listener
gesture.destroy()

The example above makes a div draggable so that it follows your mouse on drag, and returns to its initial position on release.

Make sure you always set touchAction on a draggable element to prevent glitches with the browser native scrolling on touch devices.

Available hooks

@use-gesture/react exports several hooks that can handle different gestures:

Hook Description
useDrag Handles the drag gesture
useMove Handles mouse move events
useHover Handles mouse enter and mouse leave events
useScroll Handles scroll events
useWheel Handles wheel events
usePinch Handles the pinch gesture
useGesture Handles multiple gestures in one hook