primitives VS shoelace-css

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

HTMX gets all the hype right now, but there are other tools in the same vain, my favorite being Unpoly (https://unpoly.com). Together with Shoelace (https://shoelace.style) you get nice GUIs real fast, without the burden of complicated dependency management and build steps. Also, you don't have to write a lot of JS, just what is needed for small enhancements, as it was meant to be. Some might say the main drawback is the tight coupling to your backend. In my case, this is also the main benefit as it integrates perfectly with the backend framework (Django).

Hello HN,

I'm releasing Hyperdiv (https://hyperdiv.io), a framework for rapidly developing reactive browser UIs in Python, with immediate-mode syntax and using Shoelace (https://shoelace.style) as its built-in component system.

This short coding video will give you a good idea of what it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJKfxaqvGE

I wrote a brief article about the motivation and approach: https://hyperdiv.io/intro.html

Hyperdiv doesn't aim to compete with serious full-stack frameworks. The core aim was to make it easy and fast to prototype apps and build UI-based tools. I was originally motivated by internal tools at work -- feeling the need to quickly put together UI-based tools to share with both technical and non-technical coworkers, without having to stand up and maintain a full internal stack.

This is my first major open source release. I really appreciate your feedback and support. - Marius

For example, all the following design systems can be used without tooling (some of them provide ready-to-use bundles, others can be used through import maps): Google's Material Web, Microsoft's Fluent UI, IBM's Carbon, Adobe's Spectrum, Nordhealth's Nord, Shoelace, etc.

Here's what this looks like - note that I'm using Shoelace components for styling purposes.

There are lots of open-source design systems built with Lit. Shoelace is a popular component set that you might check out: https://github.com/shoelace-style/shoelace There are many others...

Would it help if we listed more open source projects on our site?

Because of our focus on components and the fact that you really can use just about any libraries and scaffolding for apps, we don't really have an app starter kit, but it's something we've talked about.

I'm really excited about all this, and it makes me have some faith in the web again. I think that Lit is a step in the right direction especially the ability to do SSR / SSG and hydrate a web page. Hopefully 🤞 Shoelace can get SSR running, which is currently one hurdle, but I think it is achievable.