simplekit

🧰 SimpleKit

A very simple user interface toolkit for teaching UI architecture.

• TypeScript and ES Modules only
• Unbundled and uncompressed exports are original source to make it easy to "Go To Definition" and trace

Setup

There are three main ways to use SimpleKit.

1. Official npm package

The npm package is updated less frequently than the GitHub repo, but it's still a good way to use SimpleKit, especially if you already have a TypeScript build process.

Once you have a node project setup, just:

npm install simplekit

Notes on this approach:

• Very easy to setup.
• A bit less intuitive to navigate SimpleKit source code since its all in a deep node_modules/ subfolder.
• You have to remember to update the package.
• Easy to share the project with someone else, just grab the files and run npm install.

2. npm link

Clone the SimpleKit repo and install everything with npm install.

From the root folder of the SimpleKit repo, run:

npm link

This adds a simulated global npm package called "simplekit" (it's literally a symbolic link to the repo folder).

To use the linked package, run the following from your project:

npm link simplekit

Now it will behave as though an official npm package was installed.

Notes on this approach:

• It's easier to look at the source code since you can open the SimpleKit repo in a separate VSCode directory.
• If you change something in SimpleKit, sometimes VS Code loses track of the linked package types (imports have red squiggles with warnings the type is any). A workaround is to run "TypeScript: Restart TS Server" from the Command Palette.
• You can't easily share your project since a linked global module won't appear in your package.json.

3. Git submodule

Add SimpleKit as a submodule to your project repo. This way it'll be in a known folder path relative to your project source, a good place to put it is in the root. So instead, of digging into node_modules/ you can just examine the simplekit folder of your project.

To import, you can just use a relative path like: import * from "../../simplekit/src/canvas-mode"

Or, even better, you can setup your build environment to have a path to the simplekit folder. For example in Vite:

• << (Vite config setup TBD) explain how to setup paths in vite config and typescript config.>>

Git doesn't automatically init and update submodules automatically, so you'll need to do it on command line the first time you clone your main repo.

• << git cloning instructions TBD >>