headlessui VS downshift 🏎

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

Website: Headless UI

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...

HeadlessUI : The library is only the headless part or behaviors you need to build accessible components. It is specifically designed to integrate with Tailwind, but you could use any CSS solution you like.

These depedencies provide unstyled accessible components from headless ui, icons from heroicons and common hooks with typescript support.

I created an ASP.NET component framework (Razor/Blazor) and used it to port HeadlesssUI (https://headlessui.com) components.

As devs, you might think of the term “headless” and your first association might be “headless components”, which are probably registered in your brain as components that only have an API and no UI. What I mean are projects/libraries like Headless UI, RadixUI, Downshift, TanStack Table, or a slew of others I might be forgetting.

I'm currently working on a project where I need to implement a Google Places autocomplete input. I've created a component called PlacesAutocomplete that uses the [use-places-autocomplete]([https://www.npmjs.com/package/use-places-autocomplete) and [headlessUI](https://headlessui.com) packages. The component encapsulates the logic for this feature fine, however, I'm facing difficulties integrating it into my form.

I recently searched for a robust, high-quality, aria conform multi-select dropdown in vanilla js. For React there is react-select or downshift, each with millions of downloads. I couldn't find a good equivalent in vanilla.

The concept is not new, it's been discussed and implemented for a couple of years, I first heard of it when Adam Watham, creator of Tailwind CSS, and its team launched Headless UI libraries like downshift by Kent Dodds also used this pattern, just to mention a couple of cases.

I think `downshift` could be considered as the best react-select alternative if you are looking to have more fine-grained control over your component or are looking for a smaller bundle size.

Downshift looks better IMO, with hooks with less "fake" hierarchy.. https://github.com/downshift-js/downshift

[2] https://github.com/downshift-js/downshift