README

⚡ Stacks ·

Build React Native layouts quickly with ease and fun.

Motivation

Max Stoiber has written an interesting article about why margin is considered harmful. There are three main disadvantages of using margin:

margin breaks component encapsulation
margin makes reusability harder
margin conflicts with how designers think

It's obvious that handling margins across the entire project is simply difficult and may not be scalable. For web projects, a design system called Braid has developer-friendly API for building layouts. However, a similar library was missing for React Native based projects. Therefore, Stacks has been created and it adopts Braid Layouts API with subtle differences.

Compatibility

Stacks is written in ReScript. It is compiled to plain JavaScript and has typings for TypeScript and Flow.

This means that out of the box Stacks is usable in any project that use the following:

plain JavaScript
TypeScript
Flow
ReScript

Stacks is supported in React Native and React Native Web projects.

Getting started

Installation

yarn add @mobily/stacks

or with npm

npm install @mobily/stacks --save

ReScript

Stacks depends on the following libraries, which you also have to install:

rescript-react-native
@rescript-react
wonka

yarn add @rescript/react rescript-react-native wonka

or with npm

npm install @rescript/react rescript-react-native wonka --save

Once all dependencies are installed, add them to bs-dependencies in your bsconfig.json:

{
  "bs-dependencies": [
    "@mobily/stacks",
    "@rescript/react",
    "rescript-react-native",
    "wonka"
  ]
}

Example

The following example shows how simple it is building screens without using neither margin nor padding properties in your style sheets objects. For debugging purposes, you may want to turn the debug mode on (pass the debug property to the provider) or use the customizable Grid component.

	Debug mode	Grid component

import React from 'react'
import { ScrollView, Text } from 'react-native'
import { Stack, Box, Columns, Column, Tiles } from '@mobily/stacks'

// import components, styles, etc.

const Profile = () => {
  return (
    <ScrollView>
      <Box padding={4}>
        <Stack space={4}>
          <Stack space={4} align="center">
            <Avatar source="…" size={96} />
            <Stack space={1} align="center">
              <Title>Jenna Doe</Title>
              <Description>Photographer &amp; Artist</Description>
            </Stack>
            <Columns>
              <Column>
                <Stack space={1} align="center">
                  <Text>Followers</Text>
                  <Counter>258</Counter>
                </Stack>
              </Column>
              <Column>
                <Stack space={1} align="center">
                  <Text>Following</Text>
                  <Counter>346</Counter>
                </Stack>
              </Column>
            </Columns>
            <Divider />
          </Stack>
          <Text>Photos</Text>
          <Tiles columns={4} space={2}>
            <Photo source="…" />
            <Photo source="…" />
            <Photo source="…" />
          </Tiles>
          <Text>Followers</Text>
          <Tiles columns={8} space={2}>
            <Avatar source="…" />
            <Avatar source="…" />
            <Avatar source="…" />
          </Tiles>
        </Stack>
      </Box>
    </ScrollView>
  )
}

Api Reference

Full documentation is available here.

Support

If you enjoy using Stacks in either personal or commercial (eg. for your company) project, please consider buying me a coffee by using the button below, thank you! ❤️