To provide some context for this, Atlassian originally created a drag and drop library called react-beautiful-dnd. A few years ago they stopped maintaining the library, and some community forks took over (I think @hello-pangea/dnd is the most popular).
In the interim I've found https://dndkit.com a _really_ nice solution, but it's only available in React-land.
Looks like this new library was written at least in part by the same guy who wrote react-beautiful-dnd, so my hopes are high (as long as this one stays maintained...)
Both the dndkit and pragmatic-drag-and-drop are great for simple use cases. If you're building something complex though, neither will cut it, nor will any other dnd library I've seen. I built a card game interface last year that involved 3 forms of droppable:
- a hand, where cards were display in a row and could be reordered
- a pile, where cards stacked and only showed the topmost card, which could be dragged off the pile
- a play area, where cards were freely arranged and overlapped each other based on which was moved most recently (and thus "on top"), and in which groups of cards could be moved as a unit via drag-select
For cases like this, these libraries prove woefully inadequate. I had to hand-write the whole thing and it was by far the most challenging front-end work I've ever done, especially since it's multiplayer.
To be fair, this is like saying Legos aren't appropriate for building a house or a pocket calculator isn't appropriate for analyzing a particles accelerator -- simple tools are great for their intended use case but you need much more advanced tools for complex scenarios.
With that said, I agree that emulating playing cards is tricky, I'm curious what you used. I built https://play.cheatatbj.com using ZimJS (whose web site looks kind of like a joke but is actually a very impressive animation framework).
I didn't use anything for DND, I wrote that all by hand. I used React, Pullstate for a state store, and PubSubJS. All of them are great to work with, although this was really, really pushing the limits of what React is made to accomodate. If you play Magic: The Gathering you can check it out by starting a mirror-match by yourself at "ca rd tav ern dot com" with the spaces removed (don't want this comment showing up in search results), but it would require you to make a deck since I haven't gotten around to adding default starter decks to new accounts yet. (The site was largely finished but never launched or shared.)
What's the point of this? To get better at blackjack?
I ask because I did a blackjack trainer to train me via repetition on perfect play (circa 2008). Still one or two things left unimplemented to this day, though, but over the course of playing a few games a day over months, I definitely did get better (losing less over time than I used to :-))
Yes. My UI's functionality was what I would personally describe as "unbelievably complicated," but I don't know how I would have done it without the modularity of React. It's a full-blown sandbox for playing Magic: The Gathering. I'm sure it could be done otherwise, but React is what I know and it didn't make sense to me to work in something I didn't know rather than something I knew well.
I’m just wrapping up a project at work with similar constraints and share the same experiences. Good library, best used for simpler use cases. Drag and drop across browsers and devices is still not a smooth dev experience. Dnd did improve it a lot and performance issues are not noticeable to the end user in our use case. Hopefully the new version that comes out continues to be as good.
I've got my hands pretty full with another project and unfortunately I don't use Twitter anymore since it became X. If you'd like, though, I can send an email to your quilt store's contact email (team@) and you can reply to that to tell me a bit more about what you're trying to do, and if I can give any genuinely useful suggestions as to how I would go about it, I will do so. But I realize technical advice != actual developer hours and if that's not so helpful, no worries.
If something(s) changed there would you have stayed or would you return?
By measurable account he's made the platform better overall, contrary to certain propaganda narrative talking points.
He did of course make Twitter-X less of a bubble machine, which arguably is bad for society because then ideological mobs with certain unchallenged ideas or beliefs go unchallenged (doesn't matter what "side" you're on, there are extreme and bad-wrong ideas on both/all) - so you'd begin to get exposed to content that may make you uncomfortable. If you're not able to quickly scan through it and not react so you just move on, it would become a tiresome and a challenge.
You could go "full bubble" like Instagram recently did though and create a setting default on to not show you "political" content from people you don't follow - arguably adding to the detriment of society, and of a seeming concerted effort by bad actors towards division and conquering us by helping reinforce the bubble walls.
I find your perspective fascinating but I never ‘got’ Twitter. My current perspective is that a bunch of idiots are loudly shouting the shortest/most successful piece of mimetic garbage has currently evolved and the day I see something useful arise out of that morass of RNA-analogue I’ll be amazed but until then I wish it would stop taking attention away from larger more nuanced conversations which are more than a couple hundred base pairs (or tokens) long that we need to be having in order to navigate our current waters
dndkit seemed very promising, until I realized the state of development [0], and critical performance issues if you want to use it for larger lists (individual issues linked within [0]). So it's fine if you need to use it for simple scenarios and a smaller number of items, but otherwise, it's inadequate in current state, unfortunately...The fact that the post was in Aug 2023, perf. issues still remain and there's low activity on issues in general, doesn't bode well...
I also found dndkit and built a very complex/robust drag and drop form builder with it. It gave me nice abstractions for custom collision detection without worrying about the browser implementation. Highly recommended.
I am one of the creators of Pragmatic drag and drop (and react-beautiful-dnd).
Thanks for the post @NeilSmith2048!
I have had a quick read over the comments on this thread, and here is some information that folks might find helpful:
- The web platform has powerful built in drag and drop functionality. Sadly though, that functionality has historically difficult to be successful with due to bugs, inconsistencies and API friction.
- Pragmatic drag and drop is low level wrapper around web platform drag and drop and is attempting to provide a fast, safe and (hopefully) easy way to successfully unlock the power of the web platform
- You can use Pragmatic drag and drop with any tech stack (svelte, vue, react, vanillajs etc) and you can use it to build _any_ drag and drop experience you like
- We have optimised Pragmatic drag and drop for performance and flexibility. It consists of a small core and lots of optional pieces. The big idea is that folks only ever need to include the code they need for their experience. Small pieces also allows folks to borrow as much as they can and only build the specific pieces they need for bespoke experiences. More details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SQkOyzZLHM
- We make it easy to attach data for external windows and applications, and to receive data from them (and you only pay code for that functionality if you want it!)
- Pragmatic drag and drop is already powering drag and drop in some of the biggest software products, including Trello, Jira and Confluence.
- We have design guidance and accessibility guidance and outputs which folks are welcome to use, or you can create your own design and accessibility solutions
- It works with multi drag. We already have multi drag in a few places in production, but we currently don't have public guidance or an example (work in progress!)
I am happy to answer questions folks might have. It's a public holiday here in Australia, so I might not be able to reply to things until tomorrow.
Thanks so much for all your hard work on both of these awesome libraries. react-beautiful-dnd (and @hello-pangea's fork) have been really nice to use. Excited to try pragmatic-drag-and-drop!
Really wonderful. I’m working on a ~relatively~ large web app and I just wrote drag and drop off as an option for form construction and report building, but this may put it back on the table. Thanks a lot!
I did notice some pretty intense issues using the examples on mobile. Is that just an issue with the examples, or is it something more foundational?
It would be great to grab some details. Probably easiest to track if you head over to the Github repo and raise an issue as we have a bug template which helps us gather the information we need to action things
I was initially pretty excited seeing this! It didn't last long though.
I found the documentation really hard to work through (no examples that don't require wading through hundreds of lines of JS/React, no API documentation?), and at the time I was looking, half the links were broken and the doc site was really, really slow.
The library says it works with any tech stack, but only lists JavaScript frameworks.
The reason we use SortableJS is because we don't have to rewrite the HTML manually as things get dragged around - from what I could glean, things like the placeholder drop line have to be added as part of your rendering template?
I got to work with Alex on the precursor to this while I was at Atlassian. He's such a delight to work with. I was a prototyper at the time and I was always surprised about the types of edge cases he would come to me with - things I would have never even considered testing. There's so much work behind the scenes that happens to make these drag and drop interactions feel natural.
Maybe I'm easy to impress, but I always stop and play around with the nested tree example when I come across Sortable. It works so flawlessly, and feels very tuned to mobile dnd. It even works to arrange (and reflow) inline spans in a paragraph! I have yet to come across this functionality in a text editor..
I can't get this to work reliably on mobile firefox, and I don't see any non-react examples which is strange given their value pitch is "use any front-end". Sortable works everywhere and has nice simple examples: https://github.com/SortableJS/Sortable
This is off topic a bit, and not a criticism of this library or its authors, but: I do think that DnD is bad for accessibility. Especially on mobile, where it's much harder to precisely click, so the deadzone required to distinguish a click from a drag has to be much larger.
But whether it's on a mouse, trackpad, touchscreen, trackpoint, or other more esoteric system, it requires a muscle hold while doing a precise movement along another axis. And this can be more difficult and RSI-inducing. God help you if you're trying to drag on a resistive touchscreen where more force is required, too.
I feel that the copy-paste workflow of pick source -> copy -> pick destination -> paste is actually easier (and much more prevalent!) than pick -> hold AND move -> drop. It also works better in windowed systems because you can more easily interact with the window system while "holding" the thing; this is often impossible or more difficult while using DnD and having to hold down the primary button.
(some drawing tools actually recognize this by having different tools/cursors for "select items" and "move item(s)". The old Acorn Archimedes used a different mouse button (middle) reserved for DnD. I feel it could work well with a stylus with a button too. But in both those cases I would prefer "click to pick up, click to drop" to holding.)
To avoid strain and accuracy requirements, iOS (and I imagine Android) support Accessibility extensions targeting drag motions - See Accessibility/Touch/AssistiveTouch.
It seems fair to have the logical gesture of a drag be provided accessibility support on a per-device basis. To the extent that any UI library is written in terms of underlying mouse clicks and locations, it would interfere with that support. So the real question is whether the UI library support for DnD can be managed using device accessibility.
The only area I think where drag and drop has an advantage is if you want to be precise about where you drop and thus realtime feedback about where it will drop is useful.
ie drag and drop effectively adds a mode while you are dragging - and as such you can have mode sensitive UI feedback that operates only in that mode - not so easy with cut and paste - the UI doesn't know you are about to paste.
This looks really good. Much better than react-beautiful-dnd which was sheer madness IMO. They were reimplementing most of the stuff browser does for you. Sadly I just built my own stuff on top of native browser drag-and-drop, but might look into changing to using this eventually.
The browsers inconsistencies are pretty annoying. Especially the weird Chrome stuff when you remove the draggable from the DOM during drag. Great to see their lib hiding this.
Maybe it's totally unjustified, but I instinctively shudder seeing "UI" and "Atlassian" in the same context. Jira might be the only thing worse than MS Teams that I [am forced to] use on the daily basis.
I had the same reaction. But looked at this and it does feel quite nice. I think most of the pain of Jira is not so much in the visual UI bit but in the overall morass of clunky flows.
That’s natively supported with the HTML5 drag and drop API using dataTransfer. React-beautiful-dnd didn’t support that because they were basically reimplementing the whole thing from scratch and bypassing the browser’s dnd stuff.
The HTML5 DnD is terrible to use, that's why many use cases require reimplementing it. For example, styling the elements is much more finnicky than it needs to be.
The styling options are baffling to me. Did they reference any existing libraries when building this feature out? I think the drag and drop functionality is fine, but the lack of any sensible styling (reorder and drop animations in particular) makes it nearly unusable.
I'm here for the phenomenon of the GitHub stars on this repo. Which was quite a weird event. Even with just the readme in the repo they got a crazy number of stars and were on GitHub trending for a day or two. What's with that? Are there just so many front-end developers, is it possible that DND is such a huge unsolved pain, is it just cause its Atlassian, did they sent a mass e-mail? I am honestly confused? What's the value of stars these days for an individual developer consuming the code?
Are we expected to be able to drag and drop elements in the List and Board examples, on mobile browsers? I can't, but I look forward to trying on a computer.
I tried the examples on mobile device and it takes awhile for component to recognize its “picked up”. Have to wait what seems like half a second. If I move before then, it doesn’t do anything or it highlights content when I try to drag.
I hope that can be tuned with the library but otherwise it looks pretty good.
edit: I really wish there was an ability to move multiple items at once. Or maybe I haven’t figured it out on mobile.
Most of these leverage the native drag and drop primitive APIs, which are going to be slightly slower on any touch device.
There's a series of events that could be fired, depending on what the user is trying to do, and initiating a drag is lower than waiting to see if they are making a gesture or clicking / tapping something.
Yeah, this is very confusing to me. The examples barely function on an iPhone. Is it just this specific implementation or is it a foundational issue with the library?
Pragmatic drag and drop is already being used to power drag and drop for Trello boards. There is some sprinkling of other drag and drop interactions around Trello - which have moved, or are moving to, Pragmatic drag and drop.
I spent the afternoon editing a document in Atlassian Confluence ... It reminded me of the old MS-DOS days when I could occasionally out-type the computer (only slower.) I hope they use this to improve their own products!
Actually, drang n drop is the festure, I never had problem in atlassian products.
Sure, their slow’ish, and went so many extra miles to torture people who use keyboard hotkeys (who could ever want to use standard ctrl+f…), but dnd part always just worked.
In the interim I've found https://dndkit.com a _really_ nice solution, but it's only available in React-land.
Looks like this new library was written at least in part by the same guy who wrote react-beautiful-dnd, so my hopes are high (as long as this one stays maintained...)