---
name: Rotate gesture
slug: rotate-gesture
category: interaction
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: Two fingers turning around a common center to rotate the object or
  view beneath them, the angle tracking the fingers as they orbit.
aliases:
  - name: rotate
    source: material
  - name: twist
    source: community
  - name: two-finger rotate
    source: community
tags:
  - canvas
  - touch
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - orbit
    - pinch-to-zoom
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations:
  - system: material
    name: Rotate
    url: https://m1.material.io/patterns/gestures.html
sources:
  - title: "Material Design: Gestures (rotate)"
    url: https://m1.material.io/patterns/gestures.html
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: turning content with two fingers rather than a handle
---

A rotate gesture is arithmetic on a line. Two contacts land, and the surface remembers the
angle of the segment between them. As the fingers orbit, that angle changes, and the
difference between the current angle and the remembered one is applied to the content. The
pivot is the midpoint of the two contacts, not the center of the object, which is why an
object turning under two fingers feels pinned to the hand rather than to the canvas. Every
part of this is the same recognizer that produces pinch: one pair of contacts yields a
distance, an angle, and a midpoint at once, so scale, rotation and pan usually arrive from
the same gesture and have to be applied together. See [multi-touch](/multi-touch) for the
contact bookkeeping underneath, which is where the `pointerId` that keeps two fingers apart
comes from.

Raw angle is almost never what ships. Fingers wobble, so a rotation applied straight from
the sensor drifts a degree or two off true and nothing ever lands square again. The fix is
detents: as the value passes within a few degrees of 0, 90, 180 or 270, it sticks there
until the fingers pull it decisively away, and good implementations mark the moment with a
short haptic tick and a guide line. A second guard is a threshold before rotation begins at
all, usually around ten degrees of travel, so a two-finger pan or pinch does not leave the
photo half a degree crooked. Both are cheap, and both are the difference between a gesture
that feels precise and one people stop using.

Whether rotation should exist at all is a question about the content. A photo, a shape on a
design canvas, a 3D model: these have no privileged orientation, so turning them is an edit
the reader intends. A map is the harder case. North up is a strong convention and a lot of
readers rely on it, so map rotation is normally paired with a compass affordance that both
reports the current heading and resets to north on a tap, and plenty of map products keep
rotation off until the reader opts in. A document, a list, or a form has no rotate at all,
because there is no meaning to give the result.

The trap is accidental rotation. Any two-finger gesture on a surface that recognizes turning
will produce a little of it, so a reader who meant to pinch a photo ends up with it three
degrees off and no obvious way back. Three habits keep that from being a bug report: give
the gesture a threshold, snap to the cardinal angles, and always offer a cheap way home,
either a reset control or plain [undo](/undo). And remember that rotation is a
[multi-touch](/multi-touch) gesture with no keyboard or mouse equivalent, so whatever it
does has to be reachable another way for anyone who cannot make it.