Surface Alternatives

surface reviews and mentions

• The Front End Treadmill
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Mar 2025

  And when you need to use JS, you can do so in a clean and controllable way.

  Using Liveview to mount and unmount custom vue components can give you an extremely nice workflow, where you can just treat a complex select (akin to select2) as another type of input

  Be sure to check out surface-ui. Marlus is a great guy, and surface really feels like the missing piece of liveview

  https://surface-ui.org/

• My Blog Engine Is the Erlang Build Tool
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Sep 2024

  It's very impressive how expressive and flexible the compilers in the BEAMverse are. Elixir extends this rather far, and there are whole utilities such as Surface[1] that are built atop and make heavy use of custom compilers

  For more germane blogging and ssg in elixir/beam, I use and recommend the excellent tableau generator[2], by Mitch Hanberg. I use it to power my own personal site[3], and publish the source[4] for anyone who is interested.

  [1] https://surface-ui.org/

  [2] https://github.com/elixir-tools/tableau

  [3] https://pdx.su

  [4] https://github.com/paradox460/pdx.su

• htmlgui.nvim - Create html + css + lua apps with neovim as 'browser'. ( proof of concept )
  2 projects | /r/neovim | 4 Jun 2023

  I should have been more clear that my intent was to create/use a compiler for some kind of component syntax. There are lots of them, from Surface (Elixir), Blade (PHP/Laravel), and JSX (React, Vue, Etc)

• Would you still choose Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView if scaling and performance weren’t an issue to solve for?
  3 projects | /r/elixir | 7 Mar 2023
• Why I selected Elixir and Phoenix as my main stack
  36 projects | dev.to | 21 Jan 2023

  There I learned more deeply about LiveView and Surface UI.

• Something similar to Vuetify for Phoenix LiveView?
  2 projects | /r/elixir | 3 Dec 2022

  I think Surface is the ideal candidate for this. But it doesn’t have the components you are looking for but you can build anything with it. Hopefully, in future we can have set of headless components built using Surface 🤞

• Single source of truth with Phoenix LiveView
  1 project | dev.to | 7 Sep 2022

  I have worked with Phoenix LiveView and Surface-UI for about a year; I would like to share some of the things I learned the hard way.

• Course/Extensive tutorials for Phoenix 1.6?
  2 projects | /r/elixir | 26 Dec 2021

  This is just an idea, but what about implementing using Phoenix.View(via use MyAppWeb, :view in your module)? Then assign I think has access to @conn. Then maybe work some magic to still allow Phoenix.Component syntax - but at this point, this is something I believe is a flow that might be in development. Try investigating / asking in Surface, because that is a lot more similar to React in its approach. In fact, I think Surface is where more aggressive features are pushed out, and ironed-out features get included into Phoenix. This was the case for Phoenix.Component, and HEEX.

• Porting files generated by phoenix to surface
  1 project | dev.to | 27 Oct 2021

  This post is intended to get you started with surface provided components. I provided the original code and surface versions so you can compare the differences yourself without installing anything. After installing surface following the installation guide https://surface-ui.org/getting_started add surface_bulma in your mix.exs, this will allow you to use the table component.

• We Got to LiveView
  19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Sep 2021

  I totally get the "Am I doing this the right way?" feeling, especially coming from Rails where everything was so opinionated and wanting to stay idiomatic.

  Phoenix, while it does have opinions, is far less opinionated in the sense that it doesn't do it darndest to force you into certain conventions (for example, if your module name doesn't match your file name, Phoenix won't complain). Its generators do try and push you toward using good DDD practices (which is my opinion is a GREAT thing), but of course the generators are completely optional.

  I don't have experience writing large LiveView apps but I would say that if you are familiar with any component-based frameworks (like React), I would take a look at SurfaceUI[1]. It simplifies a few "gotchas" in LiveView (though I would say they are very minor gotchas and worth learning about at some point) and gives you a component-rendering syntax more like React. Once you get going, you'll learn that LiveView doesn't have all the headaches that come with bigger React apps (like having to memoize functions or comparing props to avoid a re-render and whatnot). The recent release candidate for Phoenix 1.6 has made strides for a cleaner component syntax, but if you're having trouble with LiveView, Surface might bring some familiarity.

  [1] https://github.com/surface-ui/surface

• A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
  www.saashub.com | 21 May 2025

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