Introduction

An UI component library for building high-quality, accessible design systems.

Primitives is a low-level UI component library with a focus on accessibility, customization and developer experience. You can use these components either as the base layer of your design system, or adopt them incrementally.

Vision

Most of us share similar definitions for common UI patterns like accordion, checkbox, combobox, dialog, dropdown, select, slider, and tooltip. These UI patterns are documented by WAI-ARIA and generally understood by the community.

However, the implementations provided to us by the web platform are inadequate. They're either non-existent, lacking in functionality, or cannot be customized sufficiently.

So, developers are forced to build custom components; an incredibly difficult task. As a result, most components on the web are inaccessible, non-performant, and lacking important features.

Our goal is to create a well-funded, open-source component library that the community can use to build accessible design systems.

Key Features

Accessible

Components adhere to the WAI-ARIA design patterns where possible. We handle many of the difficult implementation details related to accessibility, including aria and role attributes, focus management, and keyboard navigation. Learn more in our accessibility overview.

Unstyled

Components ship with zero styles, giving you complete control over styling. Components can be styled with any styling solution (vanilla CSS, CSS preprocessors, CSS-in-JS libraries). Learn more in our styling guide.

Opened

Primitives are designed to be customized to suit your needs. Our open component architecture provides you granular access to each component part, so you can wrap them and add your own event listeners, props, or refs.

Uncontrolled

Where applicable, components are uncontrolled by default but can also be controlled, alternatively. All of the behavior wiring is handled internally, so you can get up and running as smoothly as possible, without needing to create any local states.

Developer experience

One of our main goals is to provide the best possible developer experience. Primitives provides a fully-typed API. All components share a similar API, creating a consistent and predictable experience. We've also implemented an asChild prop, giving users full control over the rendered element.

Incremental adoption

Each primitive can be installed individually so you can adopt them incrementally.

npm install @tealess/dialog
npm install @tealess/dropdown-menu
npm install @tealess/tooltip

Elements are also versioned independently, to further facilitate incremental adoption.