headlessui VS craco

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...

I had some 'fun' figuring out how to deal with not going through create-react-app without doing a full eject, got something barely working ... and discovered https://craco.js.org/ already existed and did precisely what I'd part-implemented except better.

On the upside, by that point I knew the CRA codebase well enough to predict what it would do even in edge cases, and CRACO's implementation was immediately comprehensible, and none of my colleagues had to try and understand my half-arsed NIH version.

(avoiding being in any of this situation in the first place would likely have been preferable, but given where things were when I landed on the project in question that would've required a TARDIS)

If you initiated your React application using create-react-app, leverage @craco/craco to override your webpack configuration.

Ejecting a React app is a bad idea because our application will lose all the React configurations and will not benefit from the CRA updates. Some solutions for ejecting our application include using packages like react-app-rewired or rewire. You can also use CRACO to eject your React application, but it needs you to install additional plugins.

So, instead of entirely managing these configuration files, teams took to utilizing tools such as Craco to override configurations. These tools also come with their limitations: they were not updated as quickly as CRA, so there was always a lag in implementing new features, and they added an extra layer of complexity to existing tools through overrides and additional tools.

I am not much of a fan of CRA myself but I am very much glad that https://craco.js.org exists - so far it's handled my needs for tweaking CRA behaviour in situations where "eject" didn't seem like a good route to take.

Mostly tbh to stop the freaking thing spawning inotify watchers for the entire contents of node_modules - I don't mind having to do a manual restart when I've changed dependencies and I definitely -do- mind having it eat a shedload of my user's inotify kernel allocation. (I know you can up the allocation, that's not the point, why are you on my lawn? :)

As I mentioned, in our case, the perfect tool for this job is CRACO. It will let us simply overwrite CRA’s configuration without ejecting.

Create react app + Craco

Or I could use Craco with Craco-less. Craco 6+ doesn't work with 5+ versions of react-scripts. I know I could use yarn instead of NPM which doesn't stop the installation of craco, but it can't be the solution. We can't scrap the project and restart. Further, Craco 7-alpha installs but then craco-less doesn't.

If you want to customize the webpack configuration, you either need to eject, or to work against the package (with yarn patch, forking react-scripts, or using CRACO which is the easiest). But none of them are officially maintained by the CRA team.