Radix UI- What Is Radix UI Used For? - October 21st, 2024

Radix UI is a powerful front end component which offers interactive and responsive themes, fonts, utilities, and customisable style options for faster development and better user experience.

It is an open source library with Server Side Rendering support widely used by developers across the world. Create web applications and modify components using Radix ui on react. In this article we will learn more about Radix UI

Table of Contents

What is Radix UI?

Radix UI is a front end component library with customizable components for building user interfaces in React. It is an open source library with a set of pre-built components which help build accessible UI components with minimal effort.

Radix UI Key Takeaways

Radix provides various customized pre-designed themes and components for user interface.
It is a widely accepted and tested component library for UI development
Radix UI support server side rendering (SSR) which improves load time and performance of web applications
Radix UI does not have any built in styling system.

Also, check What is Tailwind UI and its uses?

What is the use of Radix UI?

Radix UI is an open source UI front end library used for building high quality designs. It consists of pre-designed themes, interactive components, layout engine, icons, color-palette, responsive elements and much more.

Features of Radix UI

Radix UI is a powerful front end library used for quick and beautiful themes, layout, font, colors for your web page. Some of the major features of Radix UI are mentioned below

With Radix UI we can specify the colors, typography, shadows, cursor themes, and other variants of components.
Radix ui provides without any default styles. It provides flexibility to structure the UI as per need.
Provides built-in accessibility
Radix is a modular library hence you need to import only the components you will use which keeps the size small.
Interactive and responsive ui components such as Dialog, Cards, DropdownMenu, Accordion, Popover, Tabs, etc.
Radix UI also supports animations and transitions where developers can create their own animation using other libraries and frameworks.
It allows Server Side Rendering (SSR) for web applications.
Radix UI offers React Hooks to manage component state and behavior.

Also, check How to become a UI UX Designer?

How to install Radix UI?

To install Radix UI components on your local system you can type the following NPL import command in the command line.

npm install @radix-ui/themes

You will also need to import the CSS file of your project at the root of your application

import “@radix-ui/themes/styles.css”;

Example of Radix UI Component

Let us check a simple card component in Radix UI, check the implementation below.

<Card>

<Avatar

size=”3″

src=”https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1607346256330-dee7af15f7c5?&w=64&h=64&dpr=2&q=70&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.67&fp-y=0.5&fp-z=1.4&fit=crop”

radius=”full”

fallback=”T”

<Box>

Teodros Girmay

</Text>

Engineering

</Text>

</Box>

</Flex>

</Card>

</Box>

Styling with Radix UI

The theme component in radix ui is used to define the overall look of your website. Radix UI does not come with pre owned themes or styled components. Developers can customise their themes and styling using CSS or Tailwind CSS. Check how to create themes using CSS in Radix UI.

Using CSS for themes

Styling a radix ui component is easy and similar to how we used to design using CSS. You can apply custom CSS to style and theme each component in Radix UI. For example, you can customise a button style using CSS

<button className = “my-button”>

Click Me

</button>

.my-button {

background-color: #4CAF50;

color: white;

padding: 10px 20px;

border-radius: 5px;

font-size: 16px;

}

Most of the components on Radix UI come with className and style props. However, we can override these styles as per our need. You can tweak the underlying token system to achieve the design you want or create your own component using lower level building blocks such as colors or primitives at Radix UI.

The theme components on Radix UI gives developers the flexibility to choose a color of their choice from the Radix Colors. To apply colors we have to use acentcolor and specify the color on the Theme component.

</Theme>

You can also set up accentcolor scale, tokens, greys, and override themes.

Select your typography and select type scales, font weight, font family, and other customisation in your element. Use space scale tokens and decide the scaling factor for your components. You can also apply shadow using the shadow tokens which are accessible using CSS.

Key Components in Radix UI

There are many pre-designed components in Radix UI. You can find many examples on the Radix UI Page. Check some of the following components below.

Alert Dialog: It is used to throw an interrupt to the user screen and expect a response.
Aspect Ratio: Set a desired ratio to display various contents on the UI.
Avatar: Embed pre-designed profile picture with user initials or icons.
Badge: You can create badge elements and style it as per your needs.
Button: Create buttons which can be used to trigger an action or event such as submit or display a dialog box.
Card: Cards are containers which consist of content and actions.
Checkbox: Create checkbox and toggle all available options
Dropdown menu: These are menus representing various set of options which trigger specific actions using a button.

There are many other UI components in Radix UI such as Skeleton, Radio cards, switch, tabs, text area, text field, slider, popover, icon, dialog, card, etc.

Typography using Radix UI

You can customise your font style, weight, size, etc on Radix UI. For example you can use size attribute on Radix UI to allot sizes to elements present on your web page.

<Text size=”1″>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.</Text>

<Text size=”2″>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.</Text>

<Text size=”3″>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.</Text>

<Text size=”4″>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.</Text>

<Text size=”5″>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.</Text>

<Text size=”6″>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.</Text>

<Text size=”7″>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.</Text>

<Text size=”8″>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.</Text>

<Text size=”9″>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.</Text>

</Flex>

You can also add various customisations using the typography functionalities of Radix UI such as heading, blockquote, code, em, link, quote, strong, etc.

Pros of using Radix UI with React

There are many advantages of using radix ui in frontend development. Check some of the major highlights below.

Unique Components: Radix UI provides unique and responsive frontend components on its platform to enhance our user experience.
Enhance accessibility: All the components, fonts, and utilities of Radix UI are highly accessible. They are designed to enhance the accessibility of web applications.
Open Source: The radix ui library is available for everyone for free. You just need to import the library into your environment and start developing your web application.
Faster development: Radix UI simplifies the process of building responsive interactive User interface with ready to use components which requires minimal setup and hence faster development experience.
Unstyled Components: The unstyled components provide full controls where you can easily override the style and provide design freedom to developers. Create and apply your own design and integrate with CSS frameworks.
Lightweight: Radix provides component based architecture which makes it modular and easy to compose elements as per need. Import components you need and keep your codebase clean with all unnecessary configuration aside.
Support Server Side Rendering (SSR): Radix UI works with frameworks like Next.js to develop web apps with server side rendering.
Large Community Support: Radix UI is popular among developers worldwide and consists of an extensive community of experts designers, developers, etc ready to contribute. Due to large community support it is easy to get resources, tutorials and community support.

Limitations of using Radix UI

There are certain limitations of using Radix UI in frontend development. Some of them are mentioned below.

Radix UI provides a set of limited components unlike other established libraries.
The Radix icons have fixed width and we need to use CSS or size prop to modify its icon size.
No styling on components which can be a disadvantage for the dev teams.
Complex to use as compared to other libraries and frameworks.

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Radix UI FAQs

Q1. What is Radix UI?

Ans: Radix UI is an open source front end library used to create attractive and responsive User interface on React.

Q2. How to use Radix in React?

Ans: Follow the steps given below to start using radix UI in react.

Install the dependencies i,e. @radix-ui/react@latest -E from
Import various parts on the index.jsx
Add your styles
Your component is ready to use

Q3. Why is radix UI so popular?

Ans: Radix UI provides various pre-designed components, utility functions, typography, and more for building high quality web applications and designs. Hence, it is so popular among developers.