beacon_widget 0.2.0

Tap a widget in your running Flutter app and get its file:line, theme properties and geometry on your clipboard, ready to paste into an AI coding agent.

0.2.0

The desktop bridge now ships inside this package. beacon_bridge is discontinued — there is nothing to install globally any more.

Migrating from 0.1.x: drop beacon_bridge, and run the bridge from your project instead:

dart pub global deactivate beacon_bridge
dart run beacon_widget:bridge --vmservice-out-file=.ref/vm.json

The Flutter API is unchanged; Beacon.attach and everything on it keep their names and behaviour. The paste format and the .ref/ layout are unchanged too, so an existing setup keeps working once the command is swapped.

• Add the bridge executable, runnable with dart run beacon_widget:bridge from any project that depends on this package. No dart pub global activate, no ~/.pub-cache/bin on your PATH.
• Add package:beacon_widget/bridge.dart, the bridge's library surface. It is deliberately not exported from beacon_widget.dart — it targets your development machine, not the widget tree.
• Add meta, path and vm_service as dependencies. They are needed to resolve the bridge executable from a consuming project, and are not reachable from the Flutter API.

0.1.1

• Shorten the package description to pub.dev's recommended 60–180 characters.
• Point the repository links at the renamed GitHub repository.
• Set the formatter's page width to 120 to match the codebase, and format accordingly.

0.1.0

Initial release.

• Beacon.attach(child) — one-line install, wraps your app in the select-mode overlay. A genuine no-op outside debug builds: returns child unmodified, with no overlay and no VM service traffic.
• Tap-to-resolve: resolves a tapped widget to the exact file:line it was created at, using Flutter's --track-widget-creation instrumentation, and walks past framework internals to the nearest widget in your own code.
• Rich payload per selection: resolved theme properties (with provenance — it reports colorScheme.primary rather than a raw hex value where it can), geometry, constraints, enclosing route and state, ancestor chain, and a cropped screenshot of the widget.
• Selection stack: tap several widgets, then send them as one combined reference.
• Beacon.hide() / Beacon.show() / Beacon.setVisible(bool) to control the on-screen overlay, plus automatic (best-effort) hiding when a screenshot is detected.
• Broadcasts selections over the Dart VM Service for beacon_bridge to pick up.

Requires beacon_bridge running on your development machine to get selections onto your clipboard.