Drag Scroll Area

When to use

Wrap any single-row content that can overflow its container horizontally — a tab strip, a filter toolbar, a chip row — to make it draggable instead of clipping or forcing a wrap onto multiple lines. It is the primitive used to make Tabs strips scrollable.

Reach for it when:

• The number of items is variable and a fixed single-row height matters (no layout shift from wrapping).
• You want a pointer-draggable strip without a visible scrollbar.

For vertical scrolling or a styled cross-browser scrollbar, use ScrollArea instead.

Behavior

• Drag to scroll — click and drag the strip sideways. A real drag (more than 4px) swallows the trailing click, so dragging never accidentally activates the item under the pointer.
• Alpha edge fades — the side(s) with hidden content fade out via a CSS mask over the content itself. Because it masks rather than overlays a color, it blends on any background and needs no theming. The fade only appears on edges that actually overflow.
• Preserve the bottom edge — set preserveBottomEdge to keep the bottom N px fully opaque (e.g. an underline tab strip's baseline border) while the labels above it still fade. It unions a second mask layer with mask-composite: add, so a pixel survives if either layer keeps it.
• Keyboard focus — when any focusable descendant receives focus (roving tab focus, arrow keys, programmatic focus), it is scrolled fully clear of the edge fade. This is generic: it reacts to focusin and has no knowledge of its children.
• Grab cursor — shown only while there is something to scroll.

Usage

import { DragScrollArea } from '@/components/drag-scroll-area';

<DragScrollArea>
  <div className="flex w-max gap-2">{/* single-row content */}</div>
</DragScrollArea>;

The child should size to its content (e.g. w-max) so it can overflow rather than shrink to fit.

Props

DragScrollArea accepts all native div props, plus:

Accessibility

• Focusing a descendant always scrolls it fully into view, so keyboard users never land on a clipped item.
• The edge fade snaps in and out (no transition), so it carries no motion for reduced-motion users.
• Horizontal only by design — do not use it for vertical overflow.