[User reported] On-device inspector doesn't always select a widget in an overlay #9555
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 Hard to find an "inspectable" widget when in widget selection mode #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 Selecting an implementation widget with the on-device inspector opens the code location for the nearest project widget flutter#176530)
Related issue: #4869