primitives VS headlessui

Fast forward to a week ago, I cloned the Reach UI and Radix UI codebase and started exploring. Large codebases are always difficult to comprehend. With some digging around and reverse engineering, I was able to create the first component listed in the Reach UI docs, the Accordion.

Hi HN! I'm Vlad, a designer and engineer on the Radix team (https://radix-ui.com). We just launched Radix Themes, an open source component library for building modern, accessible React apps.

Radix Themes is built on top of Radix Primitives (https://radix-ui.com/primitives), which companies like Vercel, CodeSandbox, and Supabase, among others, already use to power their interfaces.

Our goal is to help you focus on your product and build it faster instead of re-inventing common designs and working on the UI components over and over.

Under the hood, Radix Themes is built with TypeScript, React and vanilla CSS. All design tokens are CSS variables that you can tweak, overwrite, or use to build your own custom components with any styling solution that you like.

The idea to build Radix Themes emerged while working on our own design system at WorkOS (https://workos.com), which is the company behind Radix. There was hundreds of design details and edge cases that we had to take care of, so it still didn't feel like a solved problem.

We also were obsessed with getting the developer experience right. For every component we asked ourselves—what is the right API? What are the right props and parts? What should, and more importantly, shouldn’t be a part of this component? What API would make the code easy to understand and maintain, and what would put you into a messy situation that could bite when you don’t expect it?

With this approach, we used our own, battle-tested components that serve our paying users to kickstart Radix Themes.

I hope that you find Radix Themes useful. Right now, there’s 45 components, hundreds of carefully crafted variants, a few simple and powerful primitives for layout, and an extensive token system.

I would love to hear your feedback on our work and learn about your experiences with building UIs.

Other things that led me to choose this path were: Most libraries that are ports, official or not, use the original name (e.g. Svelte Material UI); Radix UI's license is fairly permissive (https://github.com/radix-ui/primitives/blob/main/LICENSE), which is why I also don't think it matters that it's a company behind it. Same as why I don't see an issue with the name Preact, for example.

For a react project I recommend https://radix-ui.com, it's got pretty good defaults

radix-ui.com

This is really cool, Radix UI uses a similar hook internally for their components. I like your implementation though.

Remix is a dream. Once combined with Radix Form Component it'll be freaking heaven. https://github.com/radix-ui/primitives/blob/form-rfc/rfcs/2023-radix-form-primitive.md

Looks like radix-ui.com, but a bit more boring tbh

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...