Fluid hover interaction for interactive components

What problem does this feature solve?

Ant Design components generally provide clear hover states, but the transition between interactive states can still feel abrupt, especially for components where the user frequently moves between adjacent options.

Fluid Hover is a pattern that allows the hover indicator/background to move continuously between interactive elements instead of each element independently appearing and disappearing on hover.

For example, in a navigation menu, segmented control, tabs, or a group of buttons, moving the pointer from one item to another can feel like one continuous interaction rather than a sequence of separate state changes.

This matters at the design-system level because these interactions happen constantly. A small improvement in the continuity of hover/focus feedback can make interfaces feel significantly more responsive and polished, while providing a consistent interaction language across products using Ant Design.

The current behavior can be implemented manually in individual applications, but doing so requires custom state management, positioning, animation, and often component-specific work. This makes it difficult to achieve consistently across different Ant Design components.

What does the proposed API look like?

I don't think this necessarily needs to be exposed as a complex component-specific API. Ideally, it could be part of Ant Design's existing motion/interaction system and opt-in where appropriate.

For example, conceptually:

<Segmented
  options={options}
  motion={{
    hover: 'fluid',
  }}
/>

Or at the design-token/motion level:

<ConfigProvider
  theme={{
    motion: {
      fluidHover: true,
    },
  }}
>
  <App />
</ConfigProvider>

The exact API is open for discussion. The important part is having a shared implementation rather than requiring each application to recreate the interaction independently.

I believe this could be particularly valuable for components such as Menu, Tabs, Segmented, navigation elements, and other collections of adjacent interactive items.

I'm happy to contribute to a prototype or discuss the interaction and implementation details if this direction is considered useful for Ant Design.