How to create scrolling pages of content using tabViewStyle()

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    December 1st 2022

Updated for Xcode 14.2

Updated in iOS 15

SwiftUI’s TabView doubles up as the equivalent to a UIPageViewController, letting us swipe through multiple screens of content, with paging dots at the bottom to show users where they are.

To activate the page view style, attach the .tabViewStyle() modifier to your TabView, passing in .page.

For example, you could add this to your @main Swift file:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        TabView {
            Text("First")
            Text("Second")
            Text("Third")
            Text("Fourth")
        }
        .tabViewStyle(.page)
    }
}

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Important: If you’re using Xcode 12 you need to use PageTabViewStyle() rather than .page.

When that runs on iOS, tvOS, and watchOS, you’ll find you can swipe through a list of pages. On macOS .page is not supported.

Warning: The paging dots are white and translucent white, so if your view background is also white you won’t see them.

To solve this, you can ask SwiftUI to place a background behind by placing extra modifier after tabViewStyle():

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        TabView {
            Text("First")
            Text("Second")
            Text("Third")
            Text("Fourth")
        }
        .tabViewStyle(.page)
        .indexViewStyle(.page(backgroundDisplayMode: .always))
    }
}

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Important: If you’re using Xcode 12 you need to use PageIndexViewStyle(backgroundDisplayMode: .always) rather than .page(backgroundDisplayMode: .always).

You can control the way paging dots are shown by adding an extra parameter to the .page method. For example, if you never wanted the paging dots to be shown, you would use this:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        TabView {
            Text("First")
            Text("Second")
            Text("Third")
            Text("Fourth")
        }
        .tabViewStyle(.page(indexDisplayMode: .never))
    }
}

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