At its core, Theme UI lets you create a "theme", an object that contains all of the styles that you want to be consistent across your application. You can then use those theme styles throughout your UI. Let's take a closer look.

Create your theme

After installing Theme UI by running npm i theme-ui, create your theme file with the styles you want to be part of your application's theme. This will be an object that follows some standard "Theme Specification" rules.

To speed up the process and get up and running, you can use some pre-made themes or use the Theme UI GUI to create your own basic theme and copy and paste the code snippet from that.

There are a LOT of theming options, so we won't go into detail about what they all are here. You can check it out in the docs.

ThemeProvider

Now that we've created our theme, we need to give all of our components access to it. We can do this by wrapping our App in a ThemeProvider. If you're familiar with React's Context API, this will look familiar. We can import our theme and pass it in as the value for the ThemeProvider theme prop. Now every component nested inside of our ThemeProvider can access our theme styles!

The sx prop

In order to access the styles from your theme inside of your components, you have to import jsx from Theme UI. Note: you MUST include the /** @jsx jsx */ comment at the very top above the actual import, otherwise it will break.

When import jsx, you don't need to import React from 'react' since both are using jsx. You can save yourself an extra import :)

Within your jsx tags, you can use Theme UI's sx prop in place of style or css. This allows you to access the styles from your theme while still being able to use the normal functionality of style/css! In our example here, we're accessing the primary and background color values found in our theme file, but then using raw CSS for the value for the box shadow.

Theme UI Components

Theme UI comes with some built-in components that conveniently have some default styling. This is particularly useful if you want to bootstrap a project and have some basic styling right out of the box.

In this example, we are using Theme UI's Button component. Theme UI components have a default "variant", which in the case of Button is called "primary". In many cases, there are other built-in variants (such as "secondary" for the Button component). A variant is simply that: a variant of a particular component that has some styling differences. If you don't pass in a variant to your component, it will have the default stylings.

Custom Component variants

What if you want to customize or override any of the stylings that come with the Theme UI components?

Using the Button example from the previous slide, we can customize both the primary and secondary variant stylings to fit our particular theme. In the Theme UI docs for "Component Variants", we find a list of all of the available components, their "variant group", and the name of their "default variant". For the Button component, the "variant group" is called buttons. So in our theme file, we can create a key called buttons. For its value, we create an object whose keys are the names of the variants we want to style. Then in our components, wherever we use the default primary variant for Button, it will use our color, background, and hover stylings from our theme over those same stylings that come from Theme UI by default. Likewise with wherever we use the secondary variant for Button.

Media Queries

Theme UI includes a shorthand syntax for mobile-first responsive styles so that you don't have to hard code media queries. In your theme, you can create a breakpoints array whose values are the screen widths at which you want your media query breakpoints. Then, in your component styling within the sx prop, you can set the value of a style to an array. Each index within that array corresponds with the same index of the breakpoints array in your theme. In this example, the width of this div will be 100% for the first breakpoint value, then 50% for the second, and 25% for the third.

If you need to skip a breakpoint, you can simply pass in a null value for that breakpoint value's index. This can be useful if you want to set a value for only the largest breakpoint.

/** @jsx jsx */
import { jsx } from "theme-ui"

export default (props) => (
  <div
    {...props}
    sx={{
      width: [null, null, "25%"],
    }}
  />
)

Color modes

Dark mode is all the rage these days and with Theme UI, it's easier than ever. Within your theme, under colors you can create your default "light mode" colors. Then you can create a modes object. The names of the keys inside of modes will be the names of the different color modes that you want. In this example, we created a dark mode. When the color mode changes in our application, Theme UI is smart enough that it knows which values to look at. Anywhere where a color is set to the theme's primary color, it knows which one to look at based on what color mode you are in.

Toggling Color modes

Now that we have our color mode colors set up in our theme, let's actually toggle them. Theme UI has a useColorMode hook built in that we can use instead of having to make our own custom hooks.

In this example, we can use the useColorMode hook to set the color mode in the button's onClick event. In this case, we're toggling back and forth between the default or light mode colors and dark mode colors. You can change the names of the modes to be the name of whatever color modes you created in your theme.

There is still more to learn and discuss about Theme UI. You can look at margin and padding, functional values, Styled, etc, but this should be enough to get you up and running with Theme UI!

And as always, take a peek at the docs for more info :)