Show HN: Layoutit – An interactive CSS Grid generator | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Layoutit – An interactive CSS Grid generator

layoutit.com

437 pointsrofko71 comments

Very nice - I feel like I just learned CSS Grid in like 2 seconds. Also learned about fr units:

https://alligator.io/css/css-grid-layout-fr-unit/

For Firefox users: the Firefox developer tools also have an excellent grid inspector [1] that is very helpful in understanding CSS Grid.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...

Thank you! CSS Grid is awesome.

nah, this doesn't really let you do much with css grid and you don't really get to learn the power of it. If you want to learn it pretty quickly, try this...

https://learn.freecodecamp.org/responsive-web-design/css-gri...

A lot of potential here to be the best CSS Grid visual editor, but there's some bugs to be ironed out for sure. Currently I can't finish my grid. I'm trying to increase the number of columns on my "Body" grid but when I hit the "Add" column button it's adding columns to my "Header" grid, despite my "Body" grid being selected. I also seem to be stuck in my "Body" grid and can't select other grids. Chrome 65 on Ubuntu.

Thanks for your report! We'll definitely work on fixing bugs for complex nested grids. We usually update it every week.

Cheers

We have just pushed an update that should fix this and other issues!

If you're taking requests, a similar page for Flexbox would be the bee's knees.

Is there a case you would prefer Flexbox over Grid?

Flexbox generally is better if you have a dynamic number of elements. Grid isn't a replacement for flexbox.

Grid can also be amazing for dynamic number of elements! Check this out: https://gridbyexample.com/examples/example17 Grid has an amazing repeat feature: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/repeat Very powerful.

Implicit item positioning is a hallmark of CSS grid.

IE support? Only an old version of grid is supported in IE. One which is not compatible with the new spec.

We offer some support for the previous version of the spec. In those cases you can add a media query to detect IE10+ and override some of the properties. It works well as a starting point for supporting the legacy grid. In our tests the positioning is working as expected, but the sizing units might need some tweaks.

For me the biggest issue with IE grid is the lack of support for auto-positioning of elements. If you don't rely on that for your design you can support IE10+ pretty well.

Browser support as well. Grid is only about <90% covered.

https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid

I remember a video + blog post about this, and it was suggested to just ship a mobile layout for browsers that don't support css grid. At least for personal sites that seemed reasonable.

EDIT: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=txZq7Laz7_4

Thanks for this :)

Here's a great explanation from Jen Simmons that really helped me understand the differences and respective strengths and weaknesses of each:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs3piaN4b5I

TLDR: I don't think her examples are any good, so this clip gives the "rationale" behind it but no actual-world examples to really understand the differences.

I don't think the example she uses is a good one. That thing is obviously achievable using absolute positioning, which in this case is arguably easier and will give you much better browser support.

Also, the other examples she uses are really weird. Boxes of varying widths and heights. This is just not a thing in current websites.

The flexbox example where she ends up with 3 items on the first row and 4 on the second is just fantasy according to my experience. That would only work for a manually crafted page, whereas most websites with that much content items are auto-generated from some backend (even if it is markdown files in a static website generator). Otherwise please show me how can I achieve that effect with similarly sized items and how do I make it responsive.

Her examples look like those you can find over at gridbyexample.com. She's just showing what the differences are between Flexbox and CSS Grid, not real-world usage.

Responsiveness with Flexbox or CSS Grid is best achieved through media queries. You could make a really simple Flexbox or CSS Grid site with no media queries and have it be responsive, but if you want complicated layouts you'd make use of media queries. e.g. named grid-template-areas and media queries play really nice together.

Grid suffers when you deal with things of unknown variable height and unknown number of child items.

I use a mix of flexbox and floats to achieve any desired layout for RWD

Grid only has 87% browser support

Implicit grids are for unknown number of child items. See grid-auto-rows, grid-auto-columns, and grid-auto-flow.

I've been struggling to find use for Flexbox with CSS Grid. Flexbox is good for components still, but CSS Grid can do that stuff too and the automatic spacing with grid-gap is so damn appealing.

(1) In cases where you want good browser support.

(2) This is going to sound stupid...but if you don't have a grid. Flexbox is a more flexible tool in this more flexible case.

I actually think CSS Grid solves your #2. A lot of people who don't use grids were probably overwhelmed by all the grid libraries out there and the complexity and overhead of them. I made my own grids, if you could call them that, and then Flexbox showed up and everything became amazing and easier. Then CSS Grid showed up and said "You think Flexbox makes amazingly easy responsive layouts? Hold my beer."

I might be a grid-noob, but let's take a super-duper common situation:

I want to left align one element and right align another, keeping them in the same row.

Flex makes this very easy:

    <div style="display:flex; justify-content:space-between">
      <div>Left</div>
      <div>Right</div>
    </div>

Does grid also make this easy?

As another grid-noob, I thought I'd try to tackle this one. It seems to require only one additional style to define the grid:

    <div style="display:grid; grid:auto/repeat(auto-fit,minmax(min-content,0)); justify-content:space-between;">
      <div>Left</div>
      <div>Right</div>
    </div>

There's one gotcha: repeat() doesn't seem to accept min-content as its own value, so I had to use minmax(min-content,0).

It's strictly less effort to do this with flex, but I expect that as soon as you have more than two single-word divs as children, Grid becomes more useful.

Unless what I'm laying out looks just like a grid, I pretty much always prefer Flexbox. For the majority of cases where I need to do some layout with CSS these days, an image of how to do it via flexbox effortlessly pops into my head. I think that's the key: the majority of layout scenarios can easily be reduced to placing a sliding sequence of items along a string of sorts. Once you understand how that simple model is parameterized (to configure spacing between/around items, how their heights/widths should adapt etc.), I'd say (in my experience anyway) something like 80% of layout scenarios have a simple solution in terms of it, to the point where no thought is even required (though I do still often have to look up parameter names [e.g. align-content vs align-items]! which is kind of annoying).

not exactly what you're looking for but kind of close

http://flexboxfroggy.com/

Very helpful! I don't know much about css grid support but I played around with "Grid Gap" and got it working in your tool but when i exported it to a "CodePen" (awesome feature BTW) it didn't come over. The pen is https://codepen.io/anon/pen/RBZOgv. I had a Grid Gap of 10% for both rows and columns

You have to name the grid elements yourself. Check the article here to see what you do with those single periods.

https://alligator.io/css/css-grid-layout-fr-unit/

This is cool, but I'm having a lot of trouble reshaping the grids, and editing things that I've already created.

For example, I can't click on certain elements, dragging to make something bigger actually makes it smaller, etc. This will be a really nice tool once the UI is ironed out.

This is pretty slick. Nice job on visualizing CSS grids and their properties.

There are some really nice touches, like when you drag a grid boundary, it highlights the changing properties in green. I'd love to see that expanded to also highlight when you have an area selected - highlight on the side what rows/columns it is participating in.

There are a few things that would be nice to touch up - when you have a grid area at the top, and you attempt to create a grid inside it, the 'tabs' at the top left and top right get obscured behind the top header. A concept of a document outline on the left might be nice, too, to understand which grid exactly you are editing, when there are nested grids.

This is very cool, though. :)

Thank you! We'll work on those those UI bugs, the nested grids are a challenge.

Nice tool, will take a proper look at this later this evening.

Reminds me of this offline tool: https://cssgrid.cc/ which is also quite well rated

Do you actually use that tool?

It looks promising but I really don't like having to download software to make a web layout.

I agree I personally don't like to download offline tools for this sort of work. I haven't used it for anything serious - I just took an overall look at it after https://wesbos.com/ gave it a shout out and like you - decided it looked promising.

Mainly just posted the link to share the knowledge :)

This is very helpful and hope you'll consider making a whole series of generators for the trickier parts of css for example: gradientit animatit transformtit flexboxtit box-shadowtit

This is super cool! Only sort of related, I wonder how long they stared at that name and that it had `tit` in it before they decided to go all lowercase because they thought it was funny. I can't imagine that discussion didn't happen while planning to launch this.

What's weird is that my eye sees the word `tit` before the rest of the context. I'm not a weird pervert or anything as far as I know. It actually does cut through the signal to noise in internet promo.

I would've gone with "LayItOut". No rude implications, and it's catchier/actually makes sense as a verb phrase. Also, to "lay it out" means to tell the truth, and this is a WYSIWYG editor.

What about expertsexchange.com .. what do you see there ;o)

Maybe they should just go full hog and make this their mascot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_(bird)

It won't load for me :(

Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/lodash.js/4.17.10/lod....

Try reloading without cache! That CDN should be working.

This looks great! Extra kudos for it working on mobile (iOS 11 anyway). I’m usually checking HN on my phone and these things rarely work there.

We'll be improving the mobile experience soon :)

I used to really love the bootstrap layoutit tool. Used that heaps in the past. Can you guys please make one for design systems (like Prime React, Element, Vue Admin etc) in React/Vue so you can visually build using components from those systems? That would be beyond amazing.

https://codepen.io/werber/pen/oMGNQe

What I see in the editor is totally different than what comes over to codepen. Seems like this tool has some amazing potential!

CSS doesn’t allow selectors to begin with a number. We may add a warning or a workaround for this though!

Would it be possible to build a simple layout with two columns and a footer consisting of one column below? It seems the footer will also have to columns, no matter how I do things.

I've used the tool https://codepen.io/rofrol/pen/yqzrqa

Meh, I'll just stick with <table>, and a few frames.

tries it out

Wow, that's amazing. I'm tempted to build a new gui right now to replace a rather long in the tooth linear divs.

It's really slow, especially when you get to 40x40-ish. Does something like this need to be that slow? I'm curious if there are more optimized solutions.

I'm curious to know what sort of website layout requires a 40 x 40 grid.

whoa!!great to see these guys are still at it! I have kept an eye out for what you might come up with next as I am interested in possibly integrating it for Solvent:

http://codesolvent.com/static-assets/gif-studio/ui-builder/s...

Kudos!!

I like the export to codepen feature. Anyone know how that works?

right click the button and `inspect` in firefox or chrome, it simply submits the form immediately before the button markup using:

https://blog.codepen.io/documentation/api/prefill/

Does CSS grid support size transition animations?

> This does work but is so far only implemented in Firefox. Follow here for other browser updates. https://codepen.io/matuzo/post/animating-css-grid-layout-pro...

Thanks.

Just use SabreCMS :) You can set up your grid in much the same way, then build a full blown webshop or site directly on top of that.

Go away, shill.

I just want a grid, not a CMS

Mixing in flexbox would be nice...

very nice. very good click interactions for defining a grid area

The site is great, but the name of the domain is unfortunate

Layoutpenismightierthanthesword.com was taken.

Do you see it everywhere?

only when it's obvious: Lay-It-Out.com would have been a better domain name, 2001 style

lay what out?

I can hear fake Sean Connery:

“I’ll take ‘L.A., You tit’ for $1000”

Very nice tool!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com