The real game changer in Smooth UI is the way to extend components. This is a CodeSandbox example, feel free to play with it! https://codesandbox.io/s/7k8o4x7lj6
Looks nice; very bootstrap-y. With all the component libraries out there today, it'd be nice to know what's different about this one? What does this library solve that others don't.
Smooth UI is not better than other libraries like Material UI or Ant UI but the focus is different. Smooth UI put the focus on developer experience, extending a style is very simple. Also it exposes some classes, you don't have to learn any API to extend components, you can simply inspect components and use the classes!
Looks like the example uses that because it would otherwise be overridden by the variant=primary (which seems to be the default) so explicitly overriding that variant would probably be more intuitive and not require the !important hack.
This is a really good point... particularly with React Semantic UI [1] and Material UI [2] having tons of existing components, as well as pretty nice developer experiences.
FYI Grommet V2 has been in active development for a while and is now in beta. For styling, they’ve replaced SASS with styled components, which I think is a great move.
It's really nice to see a UI component library that is built on SC. I have multiple applications using React Semantic UI and it can sometimes be a pain to extend / compose its component's styles using SC (typically when working with child elements). Usually if you want to work with SC and vendor UI systems / components, you'll be working with CSS/SASS/LESS/Etc for the vendor components and SC for your own components. With a library like this, most of your components are now all SC (which has other benefits aside from just uniform style composition) :)
Edit: I think a big point that most non-frontend developers miss about these type of libraries is that they're designed to be extended, not necessarily used out of the box. Even if it looks identical to Bootstrap, the idea is to be able to have a nice base set of UI components that we can extend with SC -- the same way we'd extend our own internal components with SC.
Verbose, colourful output by default. Emoji in output (entirely unnecessary). It's essentially a GUI tool, not a CLI tool. The kind of tool that says "look at me! Look how much I'm doing! Aren't I amazing?". Good CLI tools just do their job. Oh and it's also unbearably slow.
So what is this, Bootstrap-remake? Sorry to sound so snarky but I myself have found it a lot easier to just make your own components and not depend on some random 3rd party library. Makes it a lot easier to customize and you might learn a thing or two. Sure it's not so easy to create them but once you learn how it pays off.
Okay now that I browsed through a little bit of the API it's all right, you don't have to invent everything by yourself if you use this. But I'm still adamant that you'd be better off to maybe rather copy the components to your source than use it as a dependency. Also there's no TypeScript support? After a lot of reluctance I've recently come to appreciate how nice TS makes your life when you avoid most of the silly bugs. Yes, sounds funny for most of people who haven't used dynamic languages but well... live and learn I guess.
In fact, components like Radios and Checkboxes are very complex to create. So we use Smooth UI as a base, but it is intentionally very light (no big components).
About TypeScript, I am sorry, I am not a TypeScript user. TypeScript support would be awesome but I need some help on this!
> I myself have found it a lot easier to just make your own components and not depend on some random 3rd party library
This. Unless you make a very generic project (and if you use React for that, probably you are doing something wrong), you bump into limitations of any CSS-framework sooner or later (later is especially painful, since it is impossible to fix without ugly workarounds).
I really don't like it when "switch" toggles don't let you slide while holding down. if you want a toggle and don't want to implement sliding, just use a checkbox. Sliding toggles have a sliding affordance, and when it's not there, it screws with me. The buttons don't have an :active state either, seemingly, but that could just be limitation of their demo stylesheet.
If you can't understand what it's doing from the source code, maybe read the documentation?
I'm not a huge fan of Styled Components, but it's a way to write properly encapsulated styles for just that moment - You write 'regular CSS' that's scoped to exactly that component, so it can't leak out and affect other parts of your site.
Well actually, I think CSS Modules solved it in the most "perfect" way, but I'm willing to believe that others have problems I haven't experienced before :)
Styled Components is a CSS in JS library. It generates classes from your CSS and inject them into components. This is much more complicated than adding a `<style />` tag in your component!
The core premise for CSS in JS is solved by backticked strings in style tags as shown above.
The backticked string style tag shown above already solves all the issues with CSS limitations in reactjs.
Here’s what the article you linked to says:
“Why does this matter?
Not all CSS features can be aliased with JavaScript event handlers , many pseudo selectors (like :disabled, :before, :nth-child) aren’t possible, styling the html and body tags isn’t supported etc.
With CSS-in-JS, you have all the power of CSS at your fingertips. Since actual CSS is generated, you can use every media query and pseudo selector you can think of. Some libraries (like jss, styled-components) even add support for neat, non-CSS-native features like nesting!”
All addressed by backticked strings in style tags.
The core premise for CSS in JS is to work around CSS's global namespace. It means you can write styles for a component using a 'local namespace' and have to worry a lot less about accidentally affecting the styles of other parts of your site. Every other language has scoping, so why can't CSS?
This is especially helpful as your site and team scales - you don't need to worry as much about stepping on other people's toes, nor do you need to be as aware of the entire (styling) scope of your website. When you do share/cascade/compose/extend styles, it makes it a lot more explicit in the way you do it.
It's basically taking a concept like BEM and baking it into the language, reducing the mental overhead.
Just stop being so confrontational. Styled-components enable you to use SASS, not having have to invent any classNames or worry about them conflicting, enables you to easily extend those styles and gives you the ability to mix code with your styles in kinda effortless way. Okay granted that mixing code is not as clean as I'd like it to be but still I haven't found a better option
You name a class ".button" and it will conflict with completely unrelated component's style tags which also have a class named ".button". You don't have this problem with CSS-in-JS. You isolate the styles completely.
It’s not really clear what this is.
Lack of a giant obvious demo link really annoys me with this sort of thing - “hey look at the code and all these words about our new visual offering”.