hint_kit 0.1.0

Tooltips, persistent hints and spotlight guided tours from one overlay engine, one placement resolver and one theme. Zero runtime dependencies.

Changelog

0.1.0

First release.

Tooltips, persistent hints and guided tours from one overlay engine, one placement resolver and one theme. No runtime dependencies.

Tooltips and hints

• Hint — a bubble anchored to any widget, shown by tap, long press, hover, focus, on appear, or on command.
• Works on disabled widgets: triggers are read from a raw Listener, so a child that ignores pointers still yields a hint, and a child that handles them keeps its own gesture.
• absorbChildInput escape hatch for children that do not hit-test at all.
• HintController for programmatic show / hide / toggle / refresh, which also reports dismissals the hint initiated itself.
• OverlayPortal rather than manual OverlayEntry, so a popped route cannot leak an entry, and LayerLink tracking, so the bubble follows its target through scroll and animation with no per-frame Dart work.
• Interactive bubbles: arbitrary widget content, and moving the pointer from the target into the bubble does not dismiss it.
• App-wide exclusivity, opt-out per hint.
• onShow / onDismiss hooks.

Tours

• TourScope, TourController, HintTarget — the tooltip engine plus a scrim and a sequencer, not a second implementation.
• Steps may live on different routes: a step whose target is not mounted waits for it rather than skipping or crashing.
• Spotlight with rect, roundedRect, circle, oval and custom shapes, optional pulse ring and optional backdrop blur; the scrim is a single Path.combine difference.
• Real hit-test passthrough via a RenderProxyBox that reports hitTestSelf false inside the hole.
• Scrollable.ensureVisible before a step, with per-frame target tracking so the spotlight stays glued through the scroll.
• Default step card with title, body, "2 of 5" progress and Back / Next / Skip, replaceable per step with contentBuilder.
• TourStorage interface with an InMemoryTourStorage default.
• Keyboard: arrows move, Enter advances, Esc skips.

Extras

• Beacon — a pulsing attention dot that opens a hint when tapped.

• HintThemeData, a ThemeExtension that themes all three features together, with per-field resolution and ColorScheme-derived defaults that look right in light and dark without configuration.

• HintPreset — nine ready-made designs (material, minimal, soft, contrast, branded, sharp, card, cupertino, adaptive) set with HintThemeData(preset: ...), app-wide or per hint. A preset is a layer, not a mode: it sits between your explicit fields and the ColorScheme defaults, so any field you also set still wins and anything the preset leaves open still adapts to the ambient theme. HintPreset.themeData(context) hands the design back as plain data for a custom design built from one. adaptive resolves through ThemeData.platform, so it is testable and honours a platform override.

• HintTransition — five show/hide animations (scale, fade, pop, slide, none), carried by the presets and settable on their own, plus HintThemeData.transitionBuilder for an animation of your own. HintTransitionInfo supplies the curved animation, a clamped one for opacity, the resolved side, an origin on the caret and a unit vector towards the target, so a custom transition works on all four sides without asking about placement.

• HintArrowShape.custom with HintThemeData.arrowBuilder — draw the caret yourself. HintArrowGeometry arrives resolved for the edge the bubble landed on, and the path is unioned into the body, so a custom caret keeps the continuous border and single shadow.

• TourLabels on TourScope — every word on the default step card, and the step counter as a callback rather than a format string, because word order is not universal. Custom cards get the same labels through TourStepInfo.labels.

• Hint.showOnce — show a hint the first time and never again, backed by HintRegistry.instance.storage and reset with HintRegistry.resetShowOnce. Blocks a HintController too, and an onAppear hint waits for the flag rather than racing the first frame.

• HintObserver and HintEvent, registered on HintRegistry — one app-wide hook for every hint show and dismiss and the whole tour lifecycle, for onboarding funnels. Hint.analyticsId gives an event a key that outlives its text.

• CallbackTourStorage — real persistence in two closures, with no subclass and no dependency. The same instance can serve tours and show-once hints.

• The spotlight now travels from the previous step's target to the next one instead of cutting, over HintThemeData.spotlightMoveDuration. It animates a fraction rather than a rect, so the destination stays live and a target that scrolls mid-travel is still followed.

• Resumable tours. TourController.start(tour, resume: true) picks up at the step the user was left on, and hasProgress answers "start or continue?" without starting anything. TourStorage gained lastIndex/saveIndex with no-op defaults, so a storage written against the old interface still works — it simply never resumes. Positions are cleared when a tour finishes or is skipped, and kept when it is cancelled.

• HintQueue — a sequence of hints without a tour: no scrim, no spotlight, no step card. Each hint waits for the previous one to close, however it closes.

• HintTarget.beforeShow — an awaited hook that lets a step open the drawer, push the route or fetch the row it is about to point at. Nothing is drawn until it completes, and it is abandoned if the tour moves on first.

• HintThemeData.backgroundBlur and the glass preset — a translucent bubble over a blurred background, clipped to the same fused silhouette as the fill, with the shadow still falling outside it.

• Desktop and web: HintTrigger.secondaryTap (right-click, read from the pointer's buttons so it never competes with the child's own handler), Hint.mouseCursor, and Hint.followPointer for a bubble that tracks the cursor instead of the widget — still placed by the full resolver, so it flips at a screen edge rather than sliding off it.

• Beacon.pulseCount — pulse a few times and settle. Also removes the "a running Beacon never lets pumpAndSettle settle" limitation.

• HintThemeData.followHighContrast — adopt the contrast design whenever the platform asks for high contrast, keeping every field you set explicitly.

• package:hint_kit/testing.dart — resetHintKit() for the process-global registry, plus FakeTourStorage and RecordingHintObserver. No dependency on flutter_test.

• CI on GitHub Actions (format, analyze, test, example test, publish dry-run) and a GitHub Pages deploy of the example app, linked from the README.

• HintThemeData.scrimOpacity — how dark a tour step gets, independent of the scrim's colour. It replaces the alpha of whatever colour is in play (an explicit scrimColor, a preset's, or the default), so a slider can be bound to it without touching the hue; 0 removes the dim and keeps the spotlight. The default dim is now heavier — 90% in light mode, 95% in dark, up from 70% and 80% — because a scrim you can read the page through competes with the step. Presets keep their own dims.

Fixed

• HintThemeData.transitionCurve was themed, merged and lerped but never applied to anything: every bubble animated linearly. It now drives the transition, with opacity clamped so an overshooting curve bounces instead of asserting.
• Two caret silhouettes via HintArrowShape: the default triangle, and curved, a speech-balloon tail whose flanks leave the bubble edge parallel to it so there is no corner where the caret meets the body. Both fill the same arrowSize box, so switching never moves the bubble.
• resolvePlacement, a pure placement function, exported for anyone building their own overlay.