vue-flex

A Vue.js functional component to wrap anything in flexbox. (1.8kb gzipped js+css, or 1.2k js & .6k css)

Getting Started

import Vue from "vue";
// imports the ESM module by default
import VueFlex from "vue-flex";
// Already autoprefixed for vendor prefixes.
// Also namespaced to avoid collisions.
import "vue-flex/dist/vue-flex.css";

Vue.use(VueFlex);

Dist Varieties

The main export is an es2015 module, but commonjs and umd modules are also available:

• Commonjs: "vue-flex/dist/vue-flex.common.js"
• UMD: "vue-flex/dist/vue-flex.js"

<main>
    <my-navbar></my-navbar>
    <flex-row tag="section">
        <my-sidebar></my-sidebar>
        <flex-col
              tag="main"
              align-v="center"
              align-h="center"
              grow
              wrap
              @click="handleClick"
        >
            <my-content></my-content>
            <my-content></my-content>
            <my-content></my-content>
        </flex-col>
    </flex-row>
</main>

Component Props

Prop	Type	Default	Description
tag	String	"div"	Element tagName (any valid HTML tag name)
inline	Boolean	false	display: inline-flex
column	Boolean	false	flex-direction: column (row is default)
reverse	Boolean	false	flex-direction: row-reverse|column-reverse
wrap	Boolean	false	flex-wrap: wrap
noWrap	Boolean	false	flex-wrap: nowrap
grow	Boolean	false	Applies to all child nodes: {flex-grow:1;flex-shrink:1;flex-basis:0;}
justify	String	null	One of [ "start", "end", "center", "between", "around" ]
align	String	null	One of [ "start", "end", "center", "baseline", "stretch" ]
alignV	String	null	One of [ "start", "end", "center", ["between", "baseline",] "stretch" ]
alignH	String	null	One of [ "start", "end", "center", ["between", "baseline",] "stretch" ]

* alignV and alignH just use align & justify under the hood, but when using the directional flex components, they handle the confusion of which axis is vertical/horizontal.

v2

Version 2 brings two new components <flex-row> & <flex-col>. In general, these just wrap the column property and make your markup more declarative. I've also added alignV & alignH props to all the components. These will use align-items & justify-content to determine the correct axis to apply your settings. Remembering which axis is vertical when in column direction is a classic confusion for me, so this abstracts that into a much more declarative api.

Flexbox all the things!

While building a large Vue.js application, I found myself constantly repeating the usage of various CSS flexbox utility classes, so I wrapped all the classes in a simple Vue component. This worked beautifully! But for two problems:

• How do I listen for native events on the <flex> component? Do I really have to re-emit all the native events to enable v-on:event?
  • No! You can use the .native modifier when binding native event listeners to a custom Vue component. I find this to be a huge stumbling block for beginners because the documentation around this feature is too easy to miss. For more info:
    • Binding Native Events to Custom Components
    • v-on modifier API reference
• How am I supposed to find anything in the Vue devtools component tree if so many of my components are wrapped in these <flex> tags?
  • If you have a <ul> with a bunch of <flex> wrapped <li>'s, it's annoying. If you use flexbox heavily, it legitimately wastes time performing a vnode scavenger hunt whenever you need to debug a particular item.

Functional Vue Components

Functional Vue components are a real game changer here. Not only does the modifier-less v-on:event syntax work again to bind to native events (when the root element of the component is an HTML Element), but functional components do not appear in Vue devtools. Beyond the debugging experience, there is a performance boost to be had as well. Functional components are stateless (no data) and instanceless (no this context). This removes the initial overhead of observation and is very beneficial when a component is likely to be rendered many times in your app (think list items in a large list).