beacon_widget 0.3.2

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.

0.3.2

• Add homepage and documentation links to the pubspec, so the pub.dev sidebar links straight to the repository and the setup instructions.

0.3.1

• Add a demo recording to the README and as a pub.dev screenshot: tapping widgets in an app running on a phone, then pasting their references into a coding agent.

0.3.0

The bridge now explains itself when it can't connect, instead of waiting in silence. Both cases below were hit repeatedly in real use, and neither was diagnosable from the output.

• If the vmservice-out-file never appears, the bridge prints where the flag has to go for the terminal, Android Studio and VS Code — including that Android Studio's "Additional run args" and "Attach args" are different fields, and that a repo with several packages has more than one run configuration to choose between. Printed once, not on a loop.
• If the file is already there but predates the bridge starting, it says so. A leftover address points at a port that died with the previous run, so connecting fails in a way that looks like a bug in the app.
• Expand the README's troubleshooting with the same three causes, and the single check that distinguishes them: whether .ref/vm.json has a fresh timestamp after launching.

0.2.3

• Replace the example app with a small storefront: a gradient promo banner, category filters, a product grid and a checkout bar, built from named widgets across several files so the references it produces look like the ones you'd get from a real app.
• Add example/tool/demo_drive.dart, which scripts a selection run through the VM Service — useful for recording a screencast without hand-tapping.

0.2.2

• Document the Android Studio / IntelliJ run configuration for the bridge as a drop-in .idea/runConfigurations/*.xml, rather than a walk through the Edit Configurations dialog.
• Warn that a run configuration's login shell can resolve a different dart than your terminal does. With more than one Flutter SDK installed (fvm plus a system-wide install, say), the older one can win and fail to resolve the project's dependencies.

0.2.1

• Rewrite the README: lead with the paste-into-an-agent workflow, explain how widget resolution actually works, and fold the IDE setup for both the app and the bridge into one section.

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.