theatre/packages/theatric/README.md

An easy to use Tweakpane/Leva-like library for React, built on top of Theatre.js.

You can use Theatric to quickly tweak values in your React components, or create quick prototypes without worrying about setting up a UI.

Unlike Leva or Tweakpane, Theatric can save or export the state of your controls and load it back in later. You can even share the state with other people, so they can see the same values you're seeing, or leave Theatric's useControls hooks in production, and let Theatric set the values from the provided state without displaying the UI.

Since Theatric is built on top of Theatre.js, you can also animate all the values.

It comes with no peer-dependencies, all you need to do to set it up is run yarn add theatric or npm install theatric.

API

useControls(controls, options?)

initialize(config)

types

useControls(controls, options?)

useControls is Theatric's main API. It is a React hook which you can call from anywhere in your component tree. It takes an object of controls and returns an object of values.

import {useControls} from 'theatric'

function Introduction() {
  const {name, age} = useControls({name: 'Andrew', age: 28})

  return (
    <div>
      Hey, I'm {name} and I'm {age} years old.
    </div>
  )
}

Optionally, you can also provide a folder option in the options argument, which will namespace your controls to that folder in the UI. This is useful if you have multiple instances of the same component, in which case the controls would collide.

import {useControls} from 'theatric'

function Introduction({id}) {
  const {name, age} = useControls({name: 'Andrew', age: 28}, {folder: id})

  return (
    <div>
      Hey, I'm {name} and I'm {age} years old.
    </div>
  )
}

useControls also returns two special properties, $get and $set, which you can use to get and set the values of your controls imperatively.

import {useControls} from 'theatric'

function Introduction() {
  const {name, age, $get, $set} = useControls({name: 'Andrew', age: 28})

  const increaseAge = useCallback(() => {
    $set((values) => values.age, $get(age + 1))
  }, [$get, $set])

  return (
    <div>
      <div>
        Hey, I'm {name} and I'm {age} years old.
      </div>
      <button onClick={increaseAge}>Increase age</button>
    </div>
  )
}

You can also place buttons on the control panel to trigger actions. You can combine this with the $get and $set methods to create a more convenient UI.

import {useControls, button} from 'theatric'

function Introduction() {
  const {name, age, $get, $set} = useControls({
    name: 'Andrew',
    age: 28,
    IncrementAge: button(() => {
      $set((values) => values.age, $get((values) => values.age) + 1)
    }),
  })

  return (
    <div>
      <div>
        Hey, I'm {name} and I'm {age} years old.
      </div>
    </div>
  )
}

initialize(config)

Optionally, you can call initialize() to initialize the UI with a certain state, or to take advantage of features like assets support. initialize() takes the same config object as getProject.

import {initialize, useControls} from 'theatric'
import theatricState from './theatricState.json'

initialize({
  state: theatricState,
  assets: {
    // Defaults to '/'
    baseUrl: '/theatric-assets',
  },
})

types

The types export lets you provide more advanced options for your controls.

For example, to specify a range for a number, or adjust the scrubbing sensitivity, you can use the number type.

import {useControls, types} from 'theatric'

function Introduction() {
  const {name, age} = useControls({
    name: 'Andrew',
    age: types.number(28, {
      // The range allowed in the UI (just a visual guide, not a validation rule)
      range: [0, 10],
      // Factor influencing the mouse-sensitivity when scrubbing the input
      nudgeMultiplier: 0.1,
    }),
  })

  return (
    <div>
      Hey, I'm {name} and I'm {age} years old.
    </div>
  )
}

To learn more about types, check out the types documentation.