All 7 Flutter Gestures & Touch Handling questions
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What is the GestureDetector widget in Flutter, and how does it let you detect common touch interactions, such as a tap, a double tap, or a long press, on any given widget? How does the gesture arena in Flutter resolve genuine ambiguity when several different overlapping widgets, or several different possible gesture types on exactly the same widget, could all potentially claim to actually recognize and handle the exact same specific touch input event? How do you properly implement a custom swipeable card interface, such as the classic swipe left or swipe right pattern popularized by many dating apps, using Draggable or a raw GestureDetector combined with an AnimationController? How do you properly detect and respond to multi touch gestures in Flutter, such as pinch to zoom or a two finger rotation gesture, using the ScaleGestureRecognizer or the InteractiveViewer widget? How can you properly implement a genuinely custom gesture recognizer in Flutter when none of the existing built in gesture recognizers, such as tap, drag, or scale, actually adequately capture the exact very specific interaction pattern your particular app genuinely needs? What performance considerations become genuinely important when handling a very high frequency of continuous gesture events, such as a genuinely fast, continuous freehand drawing gesture, without noticeably introducing visible lag or dropped frames?
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What is the difference between GestureDetector and InkWell, and when would you specifically choose InkWell instead, particularly for a Material Design styled interactive element?

Beginner

Answer

While GestureDetector purely detects gesture input without providing any visual feedback of its own whatsoever, InkWell additionally provides that same underlying gesture detection capability while also displaying Material Design's own characteristic visual ripple effect that appears to genuinely emanate outward from the exact specific point where a user actually tapped, giving helpful visual confirmation that their tap was successfully registered, and InkWell is generally the genuinely more appropriate choice specifically when you want your particular custom interactive element to visually feel consistent with the rest of a typical Material Design styled interface.
InkWell(
  onTap: () => selectItem(),
  child: Padding(
    padding: EdgeInsets.all(16),
    child: Text('Select this item'),
  ),
)
Real-world example A settings screen wraps each individual list item with InkWell rather than a plain GestureDetector, providing the exact same familiar Material ripple visual feedback a user would already genuinely expect from tapping any other typical Material Design styled list item elsewhere in the app.

Common follow-ups: Does InkWell actually require a Material widget to be present somewhere further up in the widget tree in order to properly work?;How do you properly customize InkWell's own specific ripple color?

Flutter Material Design Components;Custom Widgets & Reusable Components
All 7 Flutter Gestures & Touch Handling questions