How to add a gesture recognizer to a view

Paul Hudson @twostraws October 20th 2019

Fully updated for Xcode 11.3

Any SwiftUI view can have gesture recognizers attached, and those gesture recognizers in turn can have closures attached that will be run when the recognizer activates.

There are several gesture recognizers to work with, and I’m going to provide you with code samples for several of them to help get you started – you’ll see how similar they are.

First, TapGesture. When you create this you can specify how many taps it takes to trigger the gesture, then attach an onEnded closure that will be run when the gesture happens. For example, this creates an image that gets bigger every time it’s tapped:

struct ContentView: View {
    @State private var scale: CGFloat = 1.0

    var body: some View {
        Image("example-image")
            .scaleEffect(scale)

            .gesture(
                TapGesture()
                    .onEnded { _ in
                        self.scale += 0.1
                    }
            )
    }
}

Second, LongPressGesture recognizes when the user presses and holds on a view for at least a period of time you specify. So, this creates an image view that prints a message when its pressed for at least two seconds:

Image("example-image")
    .gesture(
        LongPressGesture(minimumDuration: 2)
            .onEnded { _ in
                print("Pressed!")
        }
    )

Finally, DragGesture triggers when the user presses down on a view and move at least a certain distance away. So, this creates an image with a drag gesture that triggers when they move it at least 50 points:

Image("example-image")
    .gesture(
        DragGesture(minimumDistance: 50)
            .onEnded { _ in
                print("Dragged!")
            }
    )

How to add a gesture recognizer to a view

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