wiggly

Spring animations in React & Typescript. Zero dependencies and lightweight (2kb). A simple alternative to libraries like framer-motion (~50kB) and react-spring (~20kB).

Usage

Import the useSpring hook, and tag the element you want to animate with the ref property.

import { useSpring } from "wiggly"

function Panel() {
  const [open, setOpen] = useState(false)
  const y = useSpring(0)

  useEffect(() => {
    y.set(120)
  }, [open])

  return <div ref={y.ref} style={{ transform: `translateY(${y})` }} />
}

To animate multiple properties, create multiple springs and combine the refs with the combineRefs helper:

import { useSpring, combineRefs } from "wiggly"

function Ball(props) {
  const x = useSpring(0)
  const y = useSpring(0)

  useEffect(() => {
    x.set(props.x)
    y.set(props.y)
  }, [props])

  return (
    <div
      ref={combineRefs(x.ref, y.ref)}
      style={{ transform: `transform(${x}, ${y})` }}
    />
  )
}

Examples

A few examples of how to use wiggly are in the examples directory.

Motivation

I frequently want to add spring-based animations to React apps, but feel guilty when I see the bundle sizes of existing solutions

• react-spring is 19.4kB large.
• framer-motion is 50.9kB. They offer a tree-shaking guide, but it doesn't make a huge difference in my testing. It's also a general purpose animation toolkit, which you don't often need
• motion is only 9.4kB, but doesn't offer React bindings (yet)

Wiggly is only 2kb. Most of that is wobble, which provides the spring logic. Of course, this low weight comes with a few limitations:

• Wiggly only animates numeric values (eg. 0 to 1), not color or string values (eg. red to blue or #000 to #fff). If you want this, you can animate a value between 0 to 1 and map the change yourself using a library like chroma.js to do the math.
• Wiggly only gives you values & CSS variables, not styles. You need to manually assign variables to a transform or whatnot. This gives you more control, but it takes a little more work.

Acknowledgements

Wiggly illustration was made by Hannah Lee.