Grabber

A grabber is a promise about a gesture. Nothing on a touch screen announces that a surface can be dragged, so the bar is drawn where a thumb would grip: a few pixels of neutral colour, centred, at the edge the sheet moves along. Apple calls it a grabber, Material calls it a drag handle, and everyone in a standup calls it the little pill.

It is a control, not decoration. The bar itself is around four pixels tall, so the region that responds to the drag has to be much larger, and the whole sheet header usually is: the mark says where, the hit area says how much room you actually have. Give it a role and a label, and let the keyboard move the sheet between its detents with arrow keys, because a gesture-only affordance is a gesture-only feature.

The grabber also tells you what kind of sheet you are looking at. A sheet with detents (peek, half, full) earns one, and dragging is how you reach them. A sheet with a single fixed height does not: the bar then advertises a gesture that does nothing, and the reader learns to distrust it. On desktop the same mark appears on resizable panes and split views, where it doubles as the divider, and there the cursor does part of the work the bar does on touch.

Draw it low contrast and keep it out of the tab order’s way, but never hide it behind the content it sits above. If a sheet’s first row scrolls under the grabber, the surface reads as broken rather than as draggable.