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Flutter Inspector
We’re very excited to be able to announce the first version of the Flutter Inspector for IntelliJ and Android Studio! It will be featured in a talk at DartConf in LA (Wednesday, Jan. 24, 10am Pacific time) and will be live streamed on the DartConf website and on the Google Developers channel on Youtube. Be sure to watch it.
The inspector makes it much easier to understand why your application is rendering the way it does. It allows you to:
- View the UI structure of your app as a tree of widgets.
- Select a point on your device or simulator and find the corresponding Widget that rendered those pixels.
- View properties for individual widgets.
- Generally, better understand layout issues.
The inspector view can be opened via View > Tool Windows > Flutter Inspector (it shows content only when an app is running). To inspect a specific widget, select the ‘Toggle inspect mode’ action in the toolbar, then click on the desired widget on the phone or simulator. The widget will be highlighted in your app’s UI, you’ll see the widget in the widget hierarchy in IntelliJ, and will be able to view the individual properties for that widget.
We’re actively working in this space, including working on ways to filter the number of widgets shown in the tree view; look for more news in the coming months. Don’t hesitate to provide feedback to us on the inspector!
Additional inspector features and changes in the M21 release:
- renamed the ‘Flutter’ view to ‘Flutter Inspector’
- normalized the Flutter Inspector toolbar icons
- in the property view, show color properties with a color swatch
- in the property view, show icon properties using their associated Material icons
- fix to enable the Flutter Inspector view to display for Bazel projects
App launch and running improvements
We now display a notification when programs elements were successfully reloaded but not run when the view was reassembled; this is an indication that you may need to restart to see your UI changes:
Additional launch and run changes:
- add a hyperlink for the “restart” message in the debugging console output
- improved console hyperlinking for local files
- ensure that an existing config is selected at startup, and fix run config autoselection for plugin projects
- for non-Bazel projects, don't show the Flutter Bazel launch type
Testing support improvements
- fix test discovery for plugin example tests, and fix discovery of tests in example sub-directories
- improve the pub root detection for flutter tests