react-motion VS styled-components

Github repo : https://github.com/chenglou/react-motion

React-Motion is an animation toolkit that makes building and implementing realistic animations much easier. However, React-Motion can be hard to grasp for beginners. But it has good documentation with rich examples to help developers.

React Motion is an animation library for React applications that makes realistic animations easier to build and implement.

Here's a comparison showing how the transition-hook bundle size compares to other React animation libraries: react-spring, framer-motion, react-motion, and react-move:

Framer Motion is a production ready animation library for React. I felt the need to add some "cool" animations to my portfolio so that it looks more alive and interactive. One can argue between choosing React Spring or React Motion but that depends on the use-case and since I've already worked with Framer motion before so I went with this.

Ah I found it. "On the Spectrum of Abstraction" by Cheng Lou (author of React-Motion)

https://github.com/chenglou/react-motion

React Motion

Thanks. Let me write some information concerning our ClojureScript frontend. We wanted to use physics-based animations using springs since only these animations make sense. Sadly the browser decided to only support silly animations which are described in terms of curves and durations. Spring animations are used on both MacOS and iOS and they look much better, since they have the natural feeling. Originally, we were using React Motion for them which would be fine for a small project. But running a lot of animations at the same time is very taxing since every frame of the animation has to go through React and all these layers. Therefore, I spent about 4 months completely rewriting most of our frontend code related to rendering and UI interactions within OrgPage. Unlike React Motion and probably any other spring-based animation library, we do not simulate these springs but instead analytically solve their differential equations. (Luckily I have a strong background in math.) I created the OrgPage https://orgpad.com/s/yRyR-GOU0Pm which summarizes math and my approach. Our animations code consists of about 5k lines of code where maybe 1k is the physics itself and computation of animation maps. The remaining 4k lines are low level controls where particular OrgPage elements are animated using requestAnimationFrame. We always calculate their new positions/sizes/etc. and apply DOM mutations, completely bypassing React, Reagent and Re-frame. There are a lot of clever optimizations to get the current speed. In upcoming months, I plan to investigate WebGL rendering which we could use to render larger parts of the documents, hopefully making everything even faster.

react-motion - A spring that solves your animation problems

Motion/transitions, powered by react-motion

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.