Element: wheel event

The wheel event fires when the user rotates a wheel button on a pointing device (typically a mouse).

This event replaces the non-standard deprecated mousewheel event.

Bubbles Yes
Cancelable Yes
Interface WheelEvent
Event handler property onwheel

Note: Don't confuse the wheel event with the scroll event. The default action of a wheel event is implementation-specific, and doesn't necessarily dispatch a scroll event. Even when it does, the delta* values in the wheel event don't necessarily reflect the content's scrolling direction. Therefore, do not rely on the wheel event's delta* properties to get the scrolling direction. Instead, detect value changes of scrollLeft and scrollTop of the target in the scroll event.

Examples

Scaling an element via the wheel

This example shows how to scale an element using the mouse (or other pointing device) wheel.

<div>Scale me with your mouse wheel.</div>

body {
  min-height: 100vh;
  margin: 0;
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  justify-content: center;
}

div {
  width: 105px;
  height: 105px;
  background: #cdf;
  padding: 5px;
}

function zoom(event) {
  event.preventDefault();

  scale += event.deltaY * -0.01;

  // Restrict scale
  scale = Math.min(Math.max(.125, scale), 4);

  // Apply scale transform
  el.style.transform = `scale(${scale})`;
}

let scale = 1;
const el = document.querySelector('div');
el.onwheel = zoom;

addEventListener equivalent

The event handler can also be set up using the addEventListener() method:

el.addEventListener('wheel', zoom);

Specifications

Specification
UI Events
# event-type-wheel

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also