tactile

Make any Flutter widget feel physical when you touch it. It tilts toward your finger, depresses at the exact press point, and a specular highlight tracks where you press.

No shaders. Compositor-only. Works on iOS, Android, web, macOS, Windows, and Linux at full frame rate.

Tactile(
  onTap: () => print('tapped'),
  child: const FlutterLogo(size: 120),
)

A card tilting toward the finger with a glare that tracks the press point

Why

Flutter has neumorphism packages for the static soft-extruded look. None of them make interaction press-position-aware — the visual response that follows where and how you touch. That's what tactile does, and it works on any child, not just buttons.

Install

flutter pub add tactile

Then import 'package:tactile/tactile.dart';.

Usage

Wrap anything:

Tactile(
  borderRadius: BorderRadius.circular(16),
  onTap: () {},
  child: myWidget,
)

Feel presets

A TactileFeel bundles the press parameters; named presets cover the common cases, and Tactile.from applies one:

Tactile.from(TactileFeel.subtle,  child: ...)  // restrained — cards, dense UI
Tactile.from(TactileFeel.crisp,   child: ...)  // quick and snappy
Tactile.from(TactileFeel.playful, child: ...)  // exaggerated — hero buttons
Tactile.from(TactileFeel.heavy,   child: ...)  // deep, slow, with a haptic

Tactile.subtle(child: ...)   // shorthand, still supported
Tactile.playful(child: ...)

Start from a preset and tweak one knob — individual parameters always win:

Tactile(feel: TactileFeel.playful, tilt: 0.1, child: ...)

The subtle, crisp, playful, and heavy presets pressed in turn

Haptics

Opt into haptic feedback, fired only on a confirmed interaction — a real tap, keyboard activation, or a completed long-press escalation. A press that turns into a scroll never buzzes:

Tactile(onTap: () {}, haptics: TactileHaptics.light, child: ...)

TactileHaptics is none (default), light, medium, heavy, or selection. With longPressEscalation: true, holding deepens the press and fires onLongPress plus a stronger haptic when it clicks into place:

A button deepening as it is held, then springing back

Theme

Set a default feel — and a default TactileStyle for the styled components — once for a whole subtree with TactileTheme. Individual widgets still override it:

TactileTheme(
  data: const TactileThemeData(feel: TactileFeel.crisp),
  child: MyApp(),
)

Styled components

Batteries-included widgets built on Tactile that own their surface, so they also morph their neumorphic shadows from extruded to flush as you press:

TactileButton(onTap: () {}, child: const Text('Press me'))

TactileCard(child: ...)               // leans like a held card

TactileTile(                          // list row
  leading: const Icon(Icons.bolt),
  title: const Text('Title'),
  subtitle: const Text('Subtitle'),
  trailing: const Icon(Icons.chevron_right),
  onTap: () {},
)

Pass a TactileStyle to control the surface (color, gradient, borderRadius, elevation, lightDirection) and the feel (tilt, depress, glareIntensity). Neumorphic shadows read best when color is close to the surrounding background.

A tactile list row depressing under the finger

A glossy gradient card tilting with a glare that tracks the finger

Tuning

Parameter	Default	What it does
`tilt`	`0.15`	Max perspective rotation toward the press point (radians). `0` disables.
`depress`	`0.04`	Fractional scale-in at the touch point. `0.04` → shrinks to 96%.
`glare`	`true`	Moving specular highlight overlay.
`glareColor`	`Colors.white`	Highlight color.
`glareIntensity`	`0.35`	Peak glare opacity at full press.
`borderRadius`	`BorderRadius.zero`	Clips the glare to the child's rounded shape.
`springBack`	`true`	Release uses spring physics (vs. reversed curve).
`pressCurve`	`Curves.easeOut`	Curve while pressing in.
`pressDuration`	`90ms`	Press-in duration.
`haptics`	`none`	Haptic on a confirmed press: `light`/`medium`/`heavy`/`selection`.
`longPressEscalation`	`false`	Hold to deepen the press; fires `onLongPress` on completion.
`enabled`	`true`	When `false`, no effects and callbacks don't fire.

Any of these can be left unset and supplied by a feel: bundle or a TactileTheme; an explicit value here always wins.

How it works

The press point drives everything — touch position is normalized to [-1, 1] from the child's center, and a single press-progress value scales both the tilt magnitude and depress depth, so release springs them back together:

Tilt — a perspective Matrix4 rotation about X/Y toward the finger.
Depress — Transform.scale with its origin offset to the touch point, so the child shrinks toward your finger rather than its center.
Glare — a radial gradient painted on top, centered at the finger and clipped to borderRadius.
Spring-back — a SpringSimulation returns press-progress to rest on release, with a little overshoot.

Effects are transform + overlay only and wrapped in a RepaintBoundary, so they run on the compositor and never touch the child's layout.

Accessibility

Respects the platform reduce-motion setting: tilt and glare are dropped, leaving only a quiet depress as the press affordance.
Exposes button semantics and a tap action when onTap is provided.
Supports keyboard activation (Enter/Space) when focused — which also fires the configured haptic.
Haptics fire only on a confirmed interaction, so a press that becomes a scroll never produces stray feedback.
enabled: false disables all effects and callbacks.
Tracks a single pointer; multi-touch can't tear the effect in two directions.
The effect follows your finger as you drag, while onTap is suppressed once the press becomes a drag (so dragging never counts as a tap).

Scrollables: Tactile drives its press through a gesture recognizer that joins the gesture arena, so inside a ListView/PageView it yields to the scroll's drag (springing back) instead of animating alongside it. Taps and standalone finger-tracking are unaffected.

Example

A gallery with recordable scenes lives in example/. Run it with:

cd example && flutter run

Status

The core Tactile wrapper, the styled components (TactileButton, TactileCard, TactileTile) with neumorphic shadow-morph, gesture-arena coexistence with scrollables, feel presets (TactileFeel), app-wide theming (TactileTheme), haptics, and long-press escalation are all in place.

Development

This repo is pinned to a Flutter version with FVM (see .fvmrc). With FVM installed:

fvm install              # gets the pinned Flutter version
fvm flutter pub get
fvm flutter test
fvm flutter analyze

(Plain flutter works too if your global SDK satisfies the constraints in pubspec.yaml.)

Support

If tactile saved you time, you can buy me a coffee ☕.