antd VS headlessui

Ant Design

Official Website: https://ant.design/

Ant Design (antd) is a React component library for building beautiful and modern user interfaces. It comes with a collection of prebuilt, enterprise-level UI components. To install Ant Design, use the command below:

🔍 Site ⭐ GitHub

(I'm a frontend dev, but I came into the design side only later in my career, after having started as a full-stack programmer.)

I think this book is probably the single best resource I've seen on the topic: https://www.refactoringui.com/

It's a really easy-to-use format (one quick tip on each page, with clear examples).

It's from the people who made Tailwind, a CSS framework that's basically a reimagining of Bootcamp for the Javascript/component era.

Check out some of their templates: https://tailwindui.com/templates

These are lookalike "modern" designs that you can pay to use, or just draw inspiration from. Imitation == flattery and all that.

Along similar lines, check out the free Next.js templates: https://vercel.com/templates/next.js

If you want to build up from components instead, Tailwind offers a component library too: https://tailwindui.com/components

For React, I prefer the astoundingly good MUI framework (amazing components with lots of customizability, a good enough default look, and great documentation): https://mui.com/ If you end up going this route, using their Figma kit (https://mui.com/store/items/figma-react/) plus the Refactoring UI book from above should allow you to whip up a pretty standard-looking, "pretty enough" design in very little time. And then implementing it using the actual MUI lib would just take a few days.

There's also Ant Design: https://ant.design/

And Chakra UI: https://chakra-ui.com/

-----------

For more theoretical stuff (i.e., less visual but still very valuable), the UX research group Nielsen Norman still has a treasure trove of valuable advice: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-ten-guidelines-for-home...

You should know the basics of accessibility (beyond general usability, this alos means alt text, header levels, contrast ratios, readability, screen readers, keyboard navigation, special considerations for the hard of sight and hearing, etc.): https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ or at least use an easy checklist tool like Microsoft's WCAG analyzer: https://accessibilityinsights.io/

Ant Design is a fantastic toolkit for React developers. It's like having a box of building blocks that are not only stylish but also super functional. With Ant Design, you get a collection of pre-made React components that you can easily put together to create a sleek and modern look for your web projects. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned developer, Ant Design simplifies the process of making your web applications both visually appealing and user-friendly. It's a go-to choice for those who want a seamless blend of design and functionality in their React applications.

The backend UI is a combination of React + MUI + Ant Design.

Material-UI Ant Design Chakra UI Semantic UI React

ant-design -> Less configurable. Limited but nice components.

GitHub stars: 88k GitHub link: https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design Documentation: https://ant.design/docs/react/getting-started

Catalyst is a comprehensive, fully componentized UI kit for modern React projects, built on the next generation of Headless UI. With Catalyst, you can create a custom set of components to use and reuse in your projects.

And that is why I was looking for a UI library that would deliver these things for a long time and today I am happy to announce that I have found it! It is Headless UI by the Tailwind Team.

Headless UI provides a suite of unstyled, fully accessible UI components perfect for developers who want full control over their interface design. It's a developer's canvas, offering the foundational parts needed to build a user interface without dictating the aesthetics, making it ideal for those who love to integrate with Tailwind CSS. With https://headlessui.com/, you can ensure that your applications are inclusive and easy to use for everyone, while also maintaining the freedom to craft a unique look and feel that aligns with your brand or style guidelines.

GitHub stars: 22.5k GitHub link: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/headlessui Documentation: https://headlessui.com/

Website: Headless UI

Few months ago, I discovered project called Headless UI and I instantly liked the idea.

In addition to Tailwind CSS, Tailwind Labs also created Headless UI, a collection of components that work well with Tailwind CSS.

Tailwind - Headless UI

Thanks for sharing! I love projects that reimagine entire ecosystems: there's a lot of value in imagining what could be if we didn't worry about what is.

Some feedback: your comparison of the various ListBox implementations[0] feels disingenuous. I know Vue best, so I looked at that implementation in detail, and it's got a lot going on that you don't attempt to replicate in your version. A few key features that are missing:

* Search—in the HeadlessUI version there are several hundred lines dedicated to making typing work for jumping to specific list items.

* Multiselect—HeadlessUI supports multiple selections, yours does not appear to. Again, this occupies a lot of lines.

* Focus management—HeadlessUI has a lot of code dedicated to smoothing out the focus management. In my testing, your implementation has pretty buggy support for using tab to navigate.

* The HeadlessUI version dedicates a lot of lines to types, where your Nue implementation is dynamically typed. This may be a feature for you, but in my mind those type declarations are doing important work.

* In general, the HeadlessUI implementation tries to be flexible for many use cases [2], while yours only needs to support the one demo list.

You also include this render.ts file [1] from HeadlessUI, which is more part of a bespoke sub-framework used by HeadlessUI than it is a necessary part of any old Vue ListBox implementation. If you're going to count that against Vue, then there are parts of Nue JS that should be included as well.

These kinds of comparisons are most persuasive if you can write all the implementations from the ground up, using idiomatic patterns for each framework and identical feature sets for each implementation. When you do that, it's easy to compare and contrast the frameworks. As it is, it's like comparing a house to a garden shed: yes, you've used fewer lines of code, but it's not obvious to me that that's a feature of Nue and not just a byproduct of a less ambitious component.

[0] https://nuejs.org/compare/component.html

[1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/headlessui/blob/%40headlessu...

[2] https://headlessui.com/vue/listbox#component-apihttps://head...