[User reported] On-device inspector doesn't always select a widget in an overlay
- Dominant language
- Dart
- Stars
- 1.7k
- Forks
- 404
- Avg merge
- 6d 17h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 18
Description
This is a user-reported issue from the 2025 DevTools user survey.
A couple users reported that the on-device inspector doesn’t always select a widget in an overlay.
---
### Details:
Currently widget inspection does not work very well for cases such as overlays. The inspector is currently relying on a RenderObject’s hitTest, which doesn’t work for all cases.
It’s also difficult to figure out where to click in order to actually select a widget.
**A few ideas for how this might be improved:**
* Show bounding boxes on hover (see https://github.com/flutter/devtools/issues/7762)
* Along with hitTest, add a hitDebug method to some RenderObjects that would be used instead.
* If a hit test matches multiple routes, then choose the top one.
* Tie each pixel to a single RenderObject
* By default, only select widgets in a user’s project (implemented in https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/176530)
---
Related issue: https://github.com/flutter/devtools/issues/4869
Contributor guide
Assessment
This issue has not been assessed yet.