What is Radix UI?
Radix UI is a headless and unstyled component library that gives us great flexibility and top-tier accessibility out of the box. Opinionated UI libraries are great and provide quick development but sometimes it's hard to restyle the components or tailor them to specific use cases. In Radix UI, you are building your components out of highly accessible primitives so you have full control over the implementation.
Why would I use it?
Someone can say: "So if I still have to build some higher order component on top of those primitives and style them, what's the benefit of it?"
Let's compare the advantages and disadvantages of building components from scratch vs using an opinionated UI library:
Building components from scratch
| advantages | disadvantages |
|---|---|
| full control over component logic | accessibility is hard |
| easier to apply fully custom styles | development takes longer |
| no external dependency | for complex UI components you have to create good docs for other devs |
Using an opinionated UI library
| advantages | disadvantages |
|---|---|
| fast development | no full flexibility |
| accessibility out of the box | you can hit the limitations of the package |
| docs are already there | harder to restyle |
| fewer bugs because it's maintained by many people | external dependency |
What Radix UI is trying to do is fit kind of in the middle of those scenarios. You have to build your own components, so you have to take care of styling and putting all the pieces together but because you are using those primitives, you don't have to worry about accessiblity and you have some basic component logic provided to you. Sadly, Radix UI was only available for React, but not anymore! 🥳
Now, the Vue version is available!
Thanks to the outstanding work of contributors, Radix Vue is finally available! 🥳 It's one of the first beta releases, so don't let a small number of GitHub stars discourage you! It's not yet 100% finished but you can track the progress of porting here.
Summary
I'm really glad that Radix UI is being ported from React ecosystem. It's a great way to build your custom components with a little help from Radix primitives. By doing that you don't have to fear some potential limitations or struggle with overriding the default styles. Huge kudos to Radix Vue team for great work!
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