Shadcn: Components that you can copy-paste into your apps | Hacker News Reader

Shadcn: Components that you can copy-paste into your apps

ui.shadcn.com

150 pointsthunderbong68 comments

These look beautiful, but the react requirement makes it harder for me to want to use them.

As someone whos just built terrible frontends using plain CSS + JS + HTML, what's the currently preferred method for building simple sites that look good? I'm looking for the sweet spot between:

* Gentle learning curve * Powerful * Looks good

I'm currently using Bootstrap because it's what was popular a decade ago the last time I built UIs, but there must have been some advancement since then

Nue with a content-first approach might work:

https://nuejs.org/

No templates yet so the "looking good" part requires CSS skills.

Maybe something like: Flowbite, or Tailwind UI? Both mostly paid but I think the value is pretty good for what you get.

Is Lit and some of the libraries made with it what you're looking for? Like maybe

https://bui.js.org/

The two seconds "Loading" on an otherwise blank screen I got (on mobile, but still) was not convincing...

Prefer native web components buuuuut honestly Lit just makes web components quicker + easier. Love me some Lit.

For simple sites: https://v2.picocss.com

I still just use Bootstrap and vanilla JS for all my projects. I also write CSS manually to adjust and fine tune the design.

This allows me to have total control over every aspect of the project, while ensuring top notch performance.

Native web components are also a very powerful tool if you take the time to understand how they work properly.

I looked into updating my setup many times over the years, but the only advancements I feel are concrete seem to come from new native html APIs and CSS capabilities.

For everything else, the introduced convenience does not justify the huge overhead in terms of complexity, performance loss and added fragility.

Honestly, once you get the hang of tailwind, its hard to go back to regular CSS. Takes barely a day to get comfortable.

Astro is real fun and can deliver ultra-performance. https://astro.build/

He's asking for a component library not a framework like astro

To be exact @ch33zer is asking for "a preferred method for building simple sites that look good"

As a backend developer who previously used bootstrap, it has been a delight to discover tailwind: https://tailwindcss.com/

I also still use Bootstrap. After adjusting it via the .scss files, it looks custom. Tailwind keeps popping up on my radar, but Bootstrap's utility classes are good enough for now.

I even exchanged the bit of Vue.js functionality with htmx.

And I use a bit of Alpine.js and vanilla JavaScript here and there, but it's very minimal.

Yet another suggestion

https://daisyui.com/

I paid for TailwindUI and Flowbite but I actually like DaisyUI the most. They're all TailwindCSS based. The difference is that DaisyUI is more like Bootstrap in that they create complete CSS components you can apply using a single class. Flowbite could be higher quality for the money, e.g. there is a "Navbar with multi-level dropdown" that doesn't really work that well on mobile. They're also using JS for dropdowns where DaisyUI is relying on pure CSS.

Depending on your stack, there are quite a few options.

Laravel:

- https://filamentphp.com/

- https://bladewindui.com/

Rails:

- https://zestui.com/ (Disclaimer: my project)

Alpine+Tailwind:

- https://devdojo.com/pines

- https://sailboatui.com/ (minimal alpine)

WebComponents:

- https://shoelace.style/

Others:

- https://daisyui.com/

- https://flowbite.com/

- https://preline.co/index.html

Shadcn for Rails (MIT License):

https://shadcn.rails-components.com

And Shadcn for Svelte: https://www.shadcn-svelte.com/

I use Quasar and Vue. This is my hammer for all nails, no matter the size of the nail.

I only write amateur apps for personal use (or a small number of people), on good networks etc. So even when I need to say "hello" centered on the screen I would fire up a full app environment.

I do this because I can reuse my knowledge in all situations.

Because I am curious and like to break what I did to the despair of the users, I recently started to use Vue + Vite + TailwindCSS + DaisyUI as a replacement. Again - a single hammer for everything, nail or not nail.

> I use Quasar and Vue. This is my hammer for all nails, no matter the size of the nail.

Vue is great, especially with their Composition API (https://vuejs.org/guide/extras/composition-api-faq.html#why-...) and something like Pinia for state management, without the hassles of something like Redux: https://pinia.vuejs.org/

As for components, I really liked the idea behind PrimeVue/PrimeReact/PrimeNG/PrimeFaces (https://www.primefaces.org/) because I'm not aware of any other attempts of creating components that actually work similarly across different frameworks/libraries and it's really good because your skills carry over pretty well if you ever find yourself exploring a slightly different stack.

For what it's worth, the components also work decently (there's a whole list https://primevue.org/autocomplete/) and look okay (with various themes available, https://primevue.org/theming/), plus you can get examples (https://blocks.primevue.org/). Oh yeah, they also have their CSS utilities (a bit like Tailwind, https://primeflex.org/installation) and icons (https://primevue.org/icons).

I actually look forwards to the day where most of these concerns are less of an artisanal craft but rather a set of boring and well known things that just work well for quickly putting together a CRUD or whatever you need.

That said, I also explored VueRequest for handling network requests a bit more easily (https://www.attojs.org/guide/gettingStarted.html) and VueUse for stuff like LocalStorage (https://vueuse.org/guide/) and while it doesn't feel like I'm building a crappy alternative to Vuex and the complexity is reasonably manageable and the usability present, occasionally it all still feels a bit annoying to deal with - reactivity, ways to shuffle around data that I get from the back end, props, various bugs... so it's not all good, but still less complex than some of the things I've seen with React or Angular.

Thanks for pointing out Primefaces, I did not know it. It looks really good - I am just not sure about their licensing and price (I developed apps for personal use). The components look great and apparently one can also use TailwondCSS natively.

VueRequest also looks nice - I use fetch to get the data but this library avoids the boilerplate.

Thansk for these ideas - I will jump once again in something new :)

Daisyui if you like tailwind Shoelace seems very good aswell, it was on HN the other day and made by a senior at Microsoft.

There have been plenty of suggestions here already, but here's one I prefer personally: https://fomantic-ui.com/ (fork of Semantic-UI)

Like other CSS-Frameworks, this can be used by adding the CDN Links for CSS/JS to the Page, and then using the components/classes. I have tried countless other frameworks, but this one really stood out to me due to the semantic class writing, like class="compact secondary button" (a smaller, secondary theme color (black by default), button)

Of course, good looks are subjective, but I like the look a lot.

I am currently supporting legacy bootstrap & jquery web app and planning to move to something modern. I am waiting for Oracle to complete migration to preact to give their framework another try. But we have shortlisted react.

I also dislike the React requirement for so many UI frameworks. Preline UI is a Tailwind CSS framework although it doesn’t work with CDN, you still need to build Tailwind. I too am looking for easy ways to build nice UIs without too much overhead.

Adobe has just released v1 of their own React components library focused on accessibility[0] similar to Shadcn. It gives you the ability to bring your own styles including TailwindCSS. Side note: their webpage provides really nice, fully interactive demos.

I really like the idea but I wish there were equivalents for Angular.

- [0] https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/

Is Angular still seeing any serious usage in 2023? I thought that React was pretty well the lingua franca by now.

According to Stack Overflow developer survey[0], Angular is used by ~20% professional respondants (for comparison, React is ~43%).

Personally if I'm building a full SPA I prefer Angular over React as I find the opinionated way takes a lot of the thinking and troubleshooting away. I've worked with large React codebases and without the opinionation they quickly devolve into spaghetti code with a multitude of libraries trying to solve the same problems just in slightly different ways.

I've tried NextJS but with each release they seem to add more complexity and the niceities that attracted me there in the first place get overshadowed by bugs and continously having to refactor because "there's a new, better way of doing things".

I'm hopeful that with the recent releases of Angular (performance; standalone components; signals being some of the main ones) will help increase popularity again but it may be that Reacts popularity keeps it on a positive spiral upward.

- [0] https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/

Interesting, thanks. Agreed both on your second and third paragraphs (React/NextJS yield endless spaghetti.)

From the "Accordion" component:

> Is it accessible? Yes. It adheres to the WAI-ARIA design patterns.

I've only checked the Tab component (as one of the more complex one from accessibility perspective), but the WAI-ARIA patterns are well implemented.

However, WAI-ARIA patterns are a necessary but not a sufficient condition. E.g., the Tab component has _detectable_ issues, i.e., run Lightroom in Chrome and you will find some problems (like contrast ratio issues). Finally, a manual test is necessary, which will show things like the insufficient focus ring in the "New York" style.

I've updated my post, where I compare different UI libraries on a subset of accessibility criteria, to include shadcn: https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-ui-frameworks/

Can you add ariakit?

Ariakit is a Reakit successor, which already got the full score in my post. Ariakit looks as accessible as Reakit. I've updated my post accordingly.

Great compilation. Thanks for putting that together.

Curious what your take is on these UI libraries that "claim" they are accessible:

https://mantine.dev - "Build fully functional accessible web applications faster than ever" https://nextui.org - "NextUI components are built on top of React Aria ensuring exceptional accessibility support as a top priority."

You can always get a first impression by checking a website with Chrome Lightroom. For Mantine, Lightroom returns a few ARIA and a lot of contrast ratio issues. NextUI is built upon React Aria, which indeed puts accessibility first. Nonetheless, NextUI includes some contrast ratio issues as well. I think that claims like "fully accessible" or "exceptional accessibility" give a false sense of security to people using those UI frameworks. Accessibility is not something a UI framework can guarantee for your app or website.

EDIT: I've added Mantine to my post. I've left out NextUI, being more of a "skin" over React Aria.

Why are people tying their UI components to libraries? Why not just build it in pure JS and ship it with the app?

We do it this way and it amazing because we can use the same design across all of our apps no matter how they are built.

If a backend team wants to whip up a simple dashboard. They have components for it.

Because the way React or Vue render and update things is very different from the vanilla JS approach. What if I want, let's say, tooltip contents to be bound to some state. Your JS implementation has no idea about the state. At best, you will provide a function to update tooltip contents.

You can write it in vanilla JS and then offer framework specific wrappers. A function to update the contents of a tooltip is probably to do it in vanilla JS. Then in your react wrapper you can tie this to a component property or something.

We use a component library written in pure JS in React apps and it works perfectly fine.

JS + HTML is more powerful than you think.

Because accessibility isn’t as easy as it should be.

It has been a while since I asked so I'll try again: is there anyone working on some type of frontend "framework" (for lack of a better term) that truly separates content from presentation?

My dream is to have something like headless-ui fully standardized, so that designers could create the styling for components against that structure and then have each "design system" as a simple set of CSS (or maybe SASS) packages.

My favorite libraries: 1. Grommet by HP 2. Oracle JET (most complete component library) 3. Baseweb by Uber

Nice. Maybe mention that they are React components in the title or intro text?

you're not wrong, but in case you need Vue: https://www.shadcn-vue.com/

There is also a Svelte port of the components too

https://www.shadcn-svelte.com/

It's not obvious these are React components.

This is awesome but I’m still waiting for a good component library that has a multi-select dropdown.

Every one I’ve seen seems to allude to adding one in the future but it never happens.

Is a good multi-select dropdown really that hard?

Have only used ReactSelect but it’s a bit annoying and over-complicated and painful to style.

Would love something with good defaults out of the box in the style of shadcn

You mean this? https://mantine.dev/core/multi-select/

There's this [1] which gets close

[1]: https://ui.shadcn.com/docs/components/dropdown-menu#checkbox...

I love radix & shadcn! it's super popular for side projects and young startups since the defaults take you very far, and are very easy to customize. everyone I've introduced them to loves it. It's harder to work into existing projects / design systems at larger co's, though

I tried it last week with the nextjs option and it doesn’t theme the components, and the automatic installation ignores the theme colors https://ui.shadcn.com/themes

So left it at that,

The theming definitely works, there must be an issue in the way you set it up.

I wonder if https://shoelace.style/ is what @ch33zer is looking for? Web components often seem overlooked in this crazy dash complicated js frameworks.

Why not comment under that post so the user sees it?

React components, not just HTML

Nothing a dev tools session couldn’t fix :-). Copy outer HTML.

That gets you the full functionality without needing React?

No but 99% of the goodness is in the style and whatever React is doing is trivial usually for these kinds of component libraries. So easy to convert to vanilla JS or even sometimes possible in pure css (for example tabbing)

I’ve been using these and vercels v0 to piece together a next.js app, and it works pretty good, for someone with no real ui design experience.

It's based on React :( Using Rails and Go + HTMX... Never ever gonna touch React!

The design reminds me a lot of Vercels own style.

The guy works for Vercel, so it does make sense.

He went to work for Vercel after this became successful.

They are Radix unstyled components with Tailwind styling so it’s easy to make them your own.

Kind of feel sorry for Radix because Shadcn gets all the hype when Radix does all the heavy lifting.

It's for web development if anybody is wondering like me (would be nice put this crucial information right on the front page).

Hacker news users and their incomprehensible titles name a more iconic duo

I hate css hence tailwind css:) I do not understand why we need another level of abstraction to build things?

Have you tried Tailwind?

Answer: it’s super fast to write, easy to read, and has really great defaults.

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