Rewrite of the UI/ styling

[ThijsZijdel]

Discussion: Mantine vs. Ant Design for UI

Personal Opinion

I personally do not like Mantine. This might be due to the current font or the way the UI code is structured. I often feel like we are copy-pasting a lot of Grids, Stacks, etc.

Previous Experience

Last year, I worked on a big personal project where I had a lot of styling available, including all default fields and component setups. In combination with Ant Design (antd), the results looked stunning in my opinion. See some screenshots below:

Additional Resources

I also have a license for Iconic, which we can use for their icons.

Poll

What do you think about this?

Note

I'm willing to do a full UI overhaul myself and set this up in one big PR this weekend.

[MKRhere]

Use me as a "Mantine looks better than antd" button:

[Sparkenstein]

switching library is not a bad idea tbh, but IMO switching to antd is. When I tried antd a few years ago, they had really bad community support, even today I see 1.1k open issues :P. I remember they just used to close issues hastily (my experience). I do agree that antd is much more widely used and battle tested probably, but I don't want to suffer through UI hacks because library is not correctly written :P. (community also seem to not prefer antd for large projects) [footnote]

I also agree than current UI with mantine does not look professional, it should look like a "productivity tool" which I think ant-design will be able to do out of the box. antd has pretty clean default UI.

I chose mantine only because of it's community support and performance. I don't care about visual elements much. I am open to explore options, but material and the likes are out of the picture. material UI slows down my m2 macbook it's that bad.

Icons 100% need a new solution. all the icons should be uniform theme. currently we have mix of material + font-aweosme + what not icons. it does not look good imo. any solutions are accepted here.

I am also open to hire a designer, fixing UI with mantine won't be an issue IMO, but open to options

• https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/sxwyad/any_reason_why_not_to_use_ant_design_in_2022/
  https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/kfnerf/thoughts_on_ant_design_vs_other_design_frameworks/
  https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/16gvmaw/do_you_recommend_use_ant_design_pros_and_cons/

[ThijsZijdel]

When applied to the mantine fields:

Let me know how u all feel about it ✌️
Edit: white window border is because my system theme is currently set to light

[Sparkenstein]

Comparing to the existing UI, I think the color contrast is not right. (I wouldn't change the colors honestly, it was picked from some vscode theme after a lots of consideration and a user survey.)

[ThijsZijdel]

What about the other features?
eg the main primary color, header/nav setup and component styling?

Since I could just move the theme/ color config for the primary gray colors in a user configurable json file (personal preference)

[Sparkenstein]

I don't mind it to be configurable, but I don't think people will be changing the app colors on daily basis.
What is your plan here, asking user to edit/create a json to change colors of the app? like vscode theme file?