How do you detect a SwiftUI touchDown event with no movement or duration?

Question

I'm trying to detect when a finger first makes contact with a view in SwiftUI. I could do this very easily with UIKit Events but can't figure this out in SwiftUI.

I've tried a DragGesture with minimum movement of 0 but it still won't change until your finger moves.

TapGesture will only work when you lift your finger and LongPressGesture will not trigger fast enough no matter what I set the parameters to.

DragGesture(minimumDistance: 0, coordinateSpace: .local).onChanged({ _ in print("down")})

LongPressGesture(minimumDuration: 0.01, maximumDistance: 100).onEnded({_ in print("down")})

I want to detect a touchDown event as soon as a finger makes contact with a view. Apple's default gestures have restrictions to either distance or time.

Update: This is not an issue anymore as Apple has seemed to update how DragGesture works or maybe I was experiencing a specific contextual bug.

Answer 1

You can use the .updating modifier like this:

struct TapTestView: View {

    @GestureState private var isTapped = false

    var body: some View {

        let tap = DragGesture(minimumDistance: 0)
            .updating($isTapped) { (_, isTapped, _) in
                isTapped = true
            }

        return Text("Tap me!")
            .foregroundColor(isTapped ? .red: .black)
            .gesture(tap)
    }
}

Some notes:

• The zero minimum distance makes sure the gesture is immediately recognised
• The @GestureState property wrapper automatically resets its value to the original value when the gesture ends. This way you only have to worry about setting isTapped to true. It will automatically be false again when the interaction ends.
• The updating modifier has this weird closure with three parameters. In this case we are only interested in the middle one. It's an inout parameter to the wrapped value of the GestureState, so we can set it here. The first parameter has the current value of the gesture; the third one is a Transaction containing some animation context.

Answer 2

If you combine the code from these two questions:

How to detect a tap gesture location in SwiftUI?

UITapGestureRecognizer - make it work on touch down, not touch up?

You can make something like this:

ZStack {
    Text("Test")
    TapView {
        print("Tapped")
    }
}

struct TapView: UIViewRepresentable {
    var tappedCallback: (() -> Void)

    func makeUIView(context: UIViewRepresentableContext<TapView>) -> TapView.UIViewType {
        let v = UIView(frame: .zero)
        let gesture = SingleTouchDownGestureRecognizer(target: context.coordinator,
                                                       action: #selector(Coordinator.tapped))
        v.addGestureRecognizer(gesture)
        return v
    }

    class Coordinator: NSObject {
        var tappedCallback: (() -> Void)

        init(tappedCallback: @escaping (() -> Void)) {
            self.tappedCallback = tappedCallback
        }

        @objc func tapped(gesture:UITapGestureRecognizer) {
            self.tappedCallback()
        }
    }

    func makeCoordinator() -> TapView.Coordinator {
        return Coordinator(tappedCallback:self.tappedCallback)
    }

    func updateUIView(_ uiView: UIView,
                      context: UIViewRepresentableContext<TapView>) {
    }
}

class SingleTouchDownGestureRecognizer: UIGestureRecognizer {
    override func touchesBegan(_ touches: Set<UITouch>, with event: UIEvent) {
        if self.state == .possible {
            self.state = .recognized
        }
    }
    override func touchesMoved(_ touches: Set<UITouch>, with event: UIEvent) {
        self.state = .failed
    }
    override func touchesEnded(_ touches: Set<UITouch>, with event: UIEvent) {
        self.state = .failed
    }
}

There's definitely some abstractions we can make so that the usage is more like the other SwiftUI Gestures, but this is a start. Hopefully Apple builds in support for this at some point.

Answer 3

You can create a view modifier this way:

extension View {
    func onTouchDownGesture(callback: @escaping () -> Void) -> some View {
        modifier(OnTouchDownGestureModifier(callback: callback))
    }
}

private struct OnTouchDownGestureModifier: ViewModifier {
    @State private var tapped = false
    let callback: () -> Void

    func body(content: Content) -> some View {
        content
            .simultaneousGesture(DragGesture(minimumDistance: 0)
                .onChanged { _ in
                    if !self.tapped {
                        self.tapped = true
                        self.callback()
                    }
                }
                .onEnded { _ in
                    self.tapped = false
                })
    }
}

Now you can use it like:

struct MyView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Text("Hello World")
            .onTouchDownGesture {
                print("View did tap!")
            }
    }
}