@use-it/event-listener

@use-it/event-listener

A custom React Hook that provides a declarative addEventListener.

Note: Version 1.x has been completely rewritten in TypeScript. See Parameters below important breaking changes.

This hook was inspired by Dan Abramov's blog post "Making setInterval Declarative with React Hooks".

I needed a way to simplify the plumbing around adding and removing an event listener in a custom hook. That lead to a chain of tweets between Dan and myself.

Installation

$ npm i @use-it/event-listener

or

$ yarn add @use-it/event-listener

Usage

Here is a basic setup.

useEventListener(eventName, handler [, options]);

Parameters

Here are the parameters that you can use. (* = optional).

Note: in version 1.0, element is now a key in options. This represents a breaking change that could effect your code. Be sure to test before updating to 1.x from version 0.x.

Parameter	Description
eventName	The event name (string). Here is a list of common events.
handler	A function that will be called whenever eventName fires on element. New in version 1.x: this can also be an object implementing the EventListener interface.
options*	An optional Options object (see below).

Options

Here is the Options object. All keys are optional. See MDN for details on capture, passive, and once.

Key	Description
element	An optional element to listen on. Defaults to global (i.e. window)
capture	A Boolean indicating that events of this type will be dispatched to the registered listener before being dispatched to any EventTarget beneath it in the DOM tree.
passive	A Boolean indicating that the handler will never call preventDefault().
once	A Boolean indicating that the handler should be invoked at most once after being added. If true, the handler would be automatically removed when invoked.

Return

This hook returns nothing.

Example

Let's look at some sample code. Suppose you would like to track the mouse position. You could subscribe to mouse move events with like this.

const useMouseMove = () => {
  const [coords, setCoords] = useState([0, 0]);

  useEffect(() => {
    const handler = ({ clientX, clientY }) => {
      setCoords([clientX, clientY]);
    };
    window.addEventListener('mousemove', handler);
    return () => {
      window.removeEventListener('mousemove', handler);
    };
  }, []);

  return coords;
};

Here we're using useEffect to roll our own handler add/remove event listener.

useEventListener abstracts this away. You only need to care about the event name and the handler function.

const useMouseMove = () => {
  const [coords, setCoords] = useState([0, 0]);
  useEventListener('mousemove', ({ clientX, clientY }) => {
    setCoords([clientX, clientY]);
  });
  return coords;
};

In TypeScript you can specify the type of the Event to be more specific. Here we set the handler's event type to MouseEvent.

const useMouseMove = () => {
  const [coords, setCoords] = React.useState([0, 0]);
  useEventListener('mousemove', ({ clientX, clientY }: MouseEvent) => {
    setCoords([clientX, clientY]);
  });
  return coords;
};

Live demo

You can view/edit the sample code above on CodeSandbox.

License

MIT Licensed

Contributors

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

Donavon West 🚇 ⚠️ 💡 🤔 🚧 👀 🔧 💻

Kevin Kipp 💻

Justin Hall 💻 📖

Jeow Li Huan 👀

Norman Rzepka 🤔

Beer van der Drift ⚠️ 💻

clingsoft 💻

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!