react-notion-x VS reakit

Formatting the API response (eg. from https://developers.notion.com/reference/retrieve-a-block) is tough, so I want to use a community-maintained package like https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x. Most Notion API users use Notion as a website builder so almost all the packages are in React.js or Next.js

I love coming across a great blog like this an realizing it was built using two of my open source repos:

- https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/nextjs-notion-starter...

- https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x

Using this library, you can easily get data from Notion Pages.

I used an open source Notion library that I'm a main maintainer of called React-Notion-x. It takes Notion data and turns it into html blocks that you can add to your website.

Long: Looks like he is using Notion as a CMS (using something like https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x) for his site and not the actual Notion share feature, seen by that the page names are not included in the urls (and that he is using NextJS for his site).

For reference, we're using the notion-compat tool from the react-notion-x package.

There are already existing libraries that wrap it, you can search them on Github, for example this one https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x

In my previous article in this series, I had created my own react components to work with the Notion API due to the lack of a recognized renderer that works with Official Notion API. I came across the react-notion-X library but that did not use the Official Notion API then so I chose to create my own renderer. But soon after I published that article, Travis Fischer (creator of react-notion-x and a couple of really handy tools) added support for the official Notion API with notion-compat (still a WIP) which allows you to use react-notion-x’s powerful react renderer with the official API. So I replaced my renderer components with the react-notion-x renderer which gave me a huge performance boost.

Yes, it's using Notion as a CMS + react-notion-x (1) + some custom styling.

(1) https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x

🔍 Site ⭐ GitHub

Typescript is a mistake. Static typing seemed like such a potentially good thing to add to javascript, but the reality is it's a nightmare to work with. If you don't believe me, go to Reakit's github and tell me the complete set of valid options for creating a tooltip.

As a tech lead (or whoever makes the technical decision), it looks very tempting to adopt the open source UI libraries, if possible. In the React.js land, I used a bit of Charkra UI and Reakit.

I'm currently considering React-aria, HeadlessUI, Radix-ui and Reakit for reimplementing the user-interface for a customer, but i find it hard to choose.

I’ve got some libraries I’m looking into to fill the gap. Currently looking at radix, reakit, and react-spectrum.

reakit - Toolkit for building accessible rich web apps with React

Reakit is a lower-level component library for building accessible high-level UI libraries, design systems and applications with React. Reakit is tiny and fast.

1. Reakit

Regardless of what you use for styling though, you should look into so-called headless ui components. These are hooks and components only focused on functionality and accessibility, which you then use to build your own styled components. Some examples are https://reakit.io/, https://www.downshift-js.com/ and https://headlessui.dev/.

For common components, I can't recommend Reakit enough. It's a keyboard accessible, unstyled component library with dialogs, popovers, and much more. I use it for all of my personal projects nowadays. Combined with Framer Motion for animation and Styled Components for styling, it's a killer mix.