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Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone reading this used Kea, especially in production, and what was your experience?

We use it in prod at PostHog (https://posthog.com/) and it's SUPER practical as an abstraction over Redux's boilerplate. Also makes for really sensible separation of logic from presentation. Only TypeScript support requires a bit of additional setup as type inference doesn't work with this architecture.

Just out of curiosity, have you seen our official Redux Toolkit package? We specifically designed it to eliminate the "boilerplate" concerns and work great with TS:

- https://redux.js.org/tutorials/essentials/part-2-app-structu...

- https://redux.js.org/introduction/why-rtk-is-redux-today

- https://redux.js.org/tutorials/typescript-quick-start

I'm also interested in hearing any particular features in Kea you find useful that aren't covered in RTK.

Well, in PostHog (I'm a colleague of Twixes), we just decided here [1] to go with Kea, as I had more experience with it.

Had Redux Toolkit been around when I started with Redux in 2016, I probably wouldn't have needed to write Kea. However I'm glad I did, as I now do consider Kea to be the better toolkit for the same job. :D. I know you disagree, and that's all fine of course :).

In my mind Kea fills in all the missing parts from React, while Redux Toolkit is still a set of utility functions for state management. You still need to find another set of tools for data loading (I see this has improved), complex data or form management, app routing, scene handling, etc. Redux Toolkit doesn't bother with most of that, and I don't think it should.

Kea however comes with solutions for all of those. The only thing missing from being able to build a complete app is a JS module bundler. Just sit down and start writing your actual app with the least amount of syntax possible to explain things in a redux'y way. Many people have told me that with Kea, the framework basically gets out of the way and disappears.

Now with the Kea 3.0 Logic Builder syntax, Kea is suddenly like lego for state management. I'm curious to see if this picks up or not. I can't unfortunately link Kea from redux.js.org to drive traffic :).

[1] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/301 -- the magic of working in an open source company is that we can post stuff like this. We're hiring!

Haha, nice, that does explain why PostHog adopted Kea! :)

I know I've said this in a couple issue threads, but just to re-state it publicly:

As Redux maintainer and RTK creator, I do feel RTK is the best approach for using Redux, and that's why we now teach it as default.

But it's great that you've been able to build out an alternate toolset on top of the Redux core that suits your needs and share that, and it's _also_ my job as maintainer to make sure that you still have the tools available to keep that working. (which is why even though I've marked `createStore` as deprecated per our prior issue threads, we're not going to _remove_ it - too many apps and libs depend on it as-is.)

And yeah, agreed that Kea and RTK have different areas of focus. We don't _want_ to handle routing or forms :)

that's far too considerate an opinion to put on the internet :)

A bit like introducing immutability removes bugs you don't understand... each time I see us replace some `useState` `useEffect` orchestration with a kea logic things get less buggy

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