Supported Types of User Input

The Qt Quick module provides support for the most common types of user input, including mouse and touch events, text input and key-press events. Other modules provide support for other types of user input (for example, the Qt Sensors module provides support for shake-gestures in QML applications).

This article covers how to handle basic user input; for further information about motion-gesture support, please see the Qt Sensors documentation. For information about audio-visual input, please see the Qt Multimedia documentation.

Mouse and Touch Events

The MouseArea type allows mouse and touch events to be handled in a QML application. A MouseArea can be combined with either an Image or a Rectangle and Text object to implement a simple button.

import QtQuick 2.3

Item {
    id: root

    width: 320
    height: 480

    Rectangle {
        color: "#272822"
        width: 320
        height: 480
    }

    Rectangle {
        id: rectangle
        x: 40
        y: 20
        width: 120
        height: 120
        color: "red"

        MouseArea {
            anchors.fill: parent
            onClicked: rectangle.width += 10
        }
    }
}

For more advanced use cases requiring multiple touch points, please read the documentation for the MultiPointTouchArea type and the PinchArea type.

Note that some types have their own built in input handling. For example, Flickable responds to mouse dragging, mouse wheel scrolling, touch dragging, and touch flicking by default.

Keyboard and Button Events

Button and key presses, from buttons on a device, a keypad, or a keyboard, can all be handled using the Keys attached property. This attached property is available on all Item derived types, and works with the Item::focus property to determine which type receives the key event. For simple key handling, you can set the focus to true on a single Item and do all your key handling there.

import QtQuick 2.3

Item {
    id: root

    width: 320
    height: 480

    Rectangle {
        color: "#272822"
        width: 320
        height: 480
    }

    Rectangle {
        id: rectangle
        x: 40
        y: 20
        width: 120
        height: 120
        color: "red"

        focus: true
        Keys.onUpPressed: rectangle.y -= 10
        Keys.onDownPressed: rectangle.y += 10
        Keys.onLeftPressed: rectangle.x += 10
        Keys.onRightPressed: rectangle.x -= 10
    }
}

For text input the Qt Quick module provides several built-in types. In particular, the TextInput and TextEdit types allow for single-line entry and multi-line editing respectively.

Here is all you need to get a working TextInput:

import QtQuick 2.3

TextInput {
    focus: true
    text: "Initial Text"
}