So a while ago I came across an issue whilst developing.
I was creating a solution in nextjs with typescript and using tailwind to help with my css.
Tailwind out of the box provides dark mode support for different styling really easily by doing the following:
<div class='bg-white dark:bg-black'>Hello World </div>
However, I needed to know when the user was in dark mode within my react application to change other parts to the system. So I began looking through npm for another solution, but with little luck I decided to take how tailwind looks for dark mode and put it into a react hook.
This is where useDarkMode comes into play. Initially I created this inside of the repository that I was working on at the time but after proving that it works, I realized it would soon be something that could help a lot of other developers.
The package also comes with types so for those using typescript you can ensure type safety and, those who aren't well... that's fine too!
So I created a new repository and published it to npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/use-dark-mode-ts.
It's really easy and simple to use, below is a code snippet:
import { useDarkMode } from 'use-dark-mode-ts';
const ExampleComponent = () => {
const isDarkMode = useDarkMode();
return (
<>
{
isDarkMode
? (<div>I am in dark mode </div>)
: (<div>I am not in dark mode </div>)
}
</>
)
}
Now by no means is it perfect and those with more experience in this area might be able to help contribute to make it even slicker. But for now, this is where I have got to and at the time of writing it has exploded with 4.2k weekly downloads.
I hope it helps as many of you as possible!
Top comments (14)
For general use, it's okay to rely on media query.
But in case of Tailwind, it also has option to set dark mode manually, by using
darkclass on parent element. tailwindcss.com/docs/dark-modeI think it would be nice to include this case (maybe some configuration option?)
I'm not sure I follow. So above you'll see how I demonstrate the usage of the dark class. But this hook allows you to get the exact value that the dark class will use, just in your react code as well.
You can change tailwind config to
darkMode: 'class'and then you can use<body class="dark">to set dark mode regardless of user'sprefers-color-schemevalue.Here you have an example play.tailwindcss.com/nQueSOesIA
In this case your hook might report incorrect value.
holy shit does tailwind always look like this?
No, I just used black and white, because didn't want to think too much about it
i meant the syntax
Yes. It's a set of utility classes. It has also possibility to configure values for default classes and create classes on the fly. But the latter isn't used very frequently in my opinion.
bruh
Looks good! May want to add a cleanup function with a
removeEventListenerthough?Yep! On the todo :)
I'm sorry I don't really understand, but I'm curious why we need a cleanup function here?
It prevents memory leaks in older browsers; if the hook is rendered and later removed the event listener in some cases will still remain. Garbage collection has improved over the years but browsers like IE haven't received these updates so it's good to manually remove event listeners for consistent behavior.
Thanks for the suggestion Bryce, this has been added in the latest version 1.0.2
Oh I see. Thanks Bryce! You were refering to the npm package? I thought you were refering to the code snippet in this blog. Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering why we need cleanup function for hook