Tap gesture

A discrete gesture that recognizes one or many taps.

Tap gestures detect one or more fingers briefly touching the screen. The fingers involved in these gestures must not move significantly from their initial touch positions. The required number of taps and allowed distance from initial position may be configured. For example, you might configure tap gesture recognizers to detect single taps, double taps, or triple taps.

In order for a gesture to activate, specified gesture requirements such as minPointers, numberOfTaps, maxDist, maxDuration, and maxDelayMs (explained below) must be met. Immediately after the gesture activates, it will end.

Reference

import { GestureDetector, Gesture } from 'react-native-gesture-handler';

function App() {
  const tap = Gesture.Tap();

  return (
    <GestureDetector gesture={tap}>
      <View />
    </GestureDetector>
  );
}

Config

Properties specific to TapGesture:

minPointers(value: number)

Minimum number of pointers (fingers) required to be placed before the gesture activates. Should be a positive integer. The default value is 1.

maxDuration(value: number)

Maximum time, expressed in milliseconds, that defines how fast a finger must be released after a touch. The default value is 500.

maxDelay(value: number)

Maximum time, expressed in milliseconds, that can pass before the next tap — if many taps are required. The default value is 500.

numberOfTaps(value: number)

Number of tap gestures required to activate the gesture. The default value is 1.

maxDeltaX(value: number)

Maximum distance, expressed in points, that defines how far the finger is allowed to travel along the X axis during a tap gesture. If the finger travels further than the defined distance along the X axis and the gesture hasn't yet activated, it will fail to recognize the gesture.

maxDeltaY(value: number)

Maximum distance, expressed in points, that defines how far the finger is allowed to travel along the Y axis during a tap gesture. If the finger travels further than the defined distance along the Y axis and the gesture hasn't yet activated, it will fail to recognize the gesture.

maxDistance(value: number)

Maximum distance, expressed in points, that defines how far the finger is allowed to travel during a tap gesture. If the finger travels further than the defined distance and the gesture hasn't yet activated, it will fail to recognize the gesture.

mouseButton(value: MouseButton) (Web & Android only)

Allows users to choose which mouse button should handler respond to. The enum MouseButton consists of the following predefined fields:

• LEFT
• RIGHT
• MIDDLE
• BUTTON_4
• BUTTON_5
• ALL

Arguments can be combined using | operator, e.g. mouseButton(MouseButton.LEFT | MouseButton.RIGHT). Default value is set to MouseButton.LEFT.

Properties common to all gestures:

enabled(value: boolean)

Indicates whether the given handler should be analyzing stream of touch events or not. When set to false we can be sure that the handler's state will never become ACTIVE. If the value gets updated while the handler already started recognizing a gesture, then the handler's state it will immediately change to FAILED or CANCELLED (depending on its current state). Default value is true.

shouldCancelWhenOutside(value: boolean)

When true the handler will cancel or fail recognition (depending on its current state) whenever the finger leaves the area of the connected view. Default value of this property is different depending on the handler type. Most handlers' shouldCancelWhenOutside property defaults to false except for the LongPressGesture and TapGesture which default to true.

hitSlop(settings)

This parameter enables control over what part of the connected view area can be used to begin recognizing the gesture. When a negative number is provided the bounds of the view will reduce the area by the given number of points in each of the sides evenly.

Instead you can pass an object to specify how each boundary side should be reduced by providing different number of points for left, right, top or bottom sides. You can alternatively provide horizontal or vertical instead of specifying directly left, right or top and bottom. Finally, the object can also take width and height attributes. When width is set it is only allow to specify one of the sides right or left. Similarly when height is provided only top or bottom can be set. Specifying width or height is useful if we only want the gesture to activate on the edge of the view. In which case for example we can set left: 0 and width: 20 which would make it possible for the gesture to be recognize when started no more than 20 points from the left edge.

IMPORTANT: Note that this parameter is primarily designed to reduce the area where gesture can activate. Hence it is only supported for all the values (except width and height) to be non positive (0 or lower). Although on Android it is supported for the values to also be positive and therefore allow to expand beyond view bounds but not further than the parent view bounds. To achieve this effect on both platforms you can use React Native's View hitSlop property.

withRef(ref)

Sets a ref to the gesture object, allowing for interoperability with the old API.

withTestId(testID)

Sets a testID property for gesture object, allowing for querying for it in tests.

cancelsTouchesInView(value) (iOS only)

Accepts a boolean value. When true, the gesture will cancel touches for native UI components (UIButton, UISwitch, etc) it's attached to when it becomes ACTIVE. Default value is true.

runOnJS(value: boolean)

When react-native-reanimated is installed, the callbacks passed to the gestures are automatically workletized and run on the UI thread when called. This option allows for changing this behavior: when true, all the callbacks will be run on the JS thread instead of the UI thread, regardless of whether they are worklets or not. Defaults to false.

simultaneousWithExternalGesture(otherGesture1, otherGesture2, ...)

Adds a gesture that should be recognized simultaneously with this one.

IMPORTANT: Note that this method only marks the relation between gestures, without composing them. GestureDetector will not recognize the otherGestures and it needs to be added to another detector in order to be recognized.

requireExternalGestureToFail(otherGesture1, otherGesture2, ...)

Adds a relation requiring another gesture to fail, before this one can activate.

blocksExternalGesture(otherGesture1, otherGesture2, ...)

Adds a relation that makes other gestures wait with activation until this gesture fails (or doesn't start at all).

IMPORTANT: Note that this method only marks the relation between gestures, without composing them.GestureDetector will not recognize the otherGestures and it needs to be added to another detector in order to be recognized.

activeCursor(value) (Web only)

This parameter allows to specify which cursor should be used when gesture activates. Supports all CSS cursor values (e.g. "grab", "zoom-in"). Default value is set to "auto".

Callbacks

Callbacks common to all gestures:

onBegin(callback)

Set the callback that is being called when given gesture handler starts receiving touches. At the moment of this callback the handler is not yet in an active state and we don't know yet if it will recognize the gesture at all.

onStart(callback)

Set the callback that is being called when the gesture is recognized by the handler and it transitions to the active state.

onEnd(callback)

Set the callback that is being called when the gesture that was recognized by the handler finishes. It will be called only if the handler was previously in the active state.

onFinalize(callback)

Set the callback that is being called when the handler finalizes handling gesture - the gesture was recognized and has finished or it failed to recognize.

onTouchesDown(callback)

Set the onTouchesDown callback which is called every time a finger is placed on the screen.

onTouchesMove(callback)

Set the onTouchesMove callback which is called every time a finger is moved on the screen.

onTouchesUp(callback)

Set the onTouchesUp callback which is called every time a finger is lifted from the screen.

onTouchesCancelled(callback)

Set the onTouchesCancelled callback which is called every time a finger stops being tracked, for example when the gesture finishes.

Event data

Event attributes specific to TapGesture:

x

X coordinate, expressed in points, of the current position of the pointer (finger or a leading pointer when there are multiple fingers placed) relative to the view attached to the GestureDetector.

y

Y coordinate, expressed in points, of the current position of the pointer (finger or a leading pointer when there are multiple fingers placed) relative to the view attached to the GestureDetector.

absoluteX

X coordinate, expressed in points, of the current position of the pointer (finger or a leading pointer when there are multiple fingers placed) relative to the window. It is recommended to use absoluteX instead of x in cases when the view attached to the GestureDetector can be transformed as an effect of the gesture.

absoluteY

Y coordinate, expressed in points, of the current position of the pointer (finger or a leading pointer when there are multiple fingers placed) relative to the window. It is recommended to use absoluteY instead of y in cases when the view attached to the GestureDetector can be transformed as an effect of the gesture.

Event attributes common to all gestures:

state

Current state of the handler. Expressed as one of the constants exported under State object by the library.

numberOfPointers

Represents the number of pointers (fingers) currently placed on the screen.

pointerType

Indicates the type of pointer device in use. This value is represented by the PointerType enum, which includes the following fields:

• TOUCH - represents finger
• STYLUS - represents stylus or digital pen
• MOUSE - represents computer mouse
• OTHER - represents unknown device type that is not relevant

Example

import { View, StyleSheet } from 'react-native';
import { Gesture, GestureDetector } from 'react-native-gesture-handler';

export default function App() {
  const singleTap = Gesture.Tap()
    .maxDuration(250)
    .onStart(() => {
      console.log('Single tap!');
    });

  const doubleTap = Gesture.Tap()
    .maxDuration(250)
    .numberOfTaps(2)
    .onStart(() => {
      console.log('Double tap!');
    });

  return (
    <GestureDetector gesture={Gesture.Exclusive(doubleTap, singleTap)}>
      <View style={styles.box} />
    </GestureDetector>
  );
}

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  box: {
    height: 120,
    width: 120,
    backgroundColor: '#b58df1',
    borderRadius: 20,
    marginBottom: 30,
  },
});