Top React Hooks — Mouse, Keyboard, and States

Photo by Ryan Stone on Unsplash

Hooks contains our logic code in our React app.

We can create our own hooks and use hooks provided by other people.

In this article, we’ll look at some useful React hooks.

react-hanger

The react-hanger library comes with various hooks we can use to do various things.

To install it, we run:

yarn add react-hanger

The usePrevious hook lets us get the previous value from the useState hook.

For instance, we can write:

import React from "react";
import { usePrevious } from "react-hanger";
export default function App() {
  const [count, setCount] = React.useState(0);
  const prevCount = usePrevious(count);
  return (
    <>
      <button onClick={() => setCount(count => count + 1)}>increment</button>
      <p>
        Now: {count}, before: {prevCount}
      </p>
    </>
  );
}

Then we have the count state with the setCount function returned from useState .

Then we pass the count state into the usePrevious hook to get the previous value of the count state returned.

React Mighty Mouse

React Mighty Mouse is a library with a hook that lets us track the mouse position.

To install it, we can run:

npm install react-hook-mighty-mouse

Then we can use it by writing:

import React from "react";
import useMightyMouse from "react-hook-mighty-mouse";
export default function App() {
  const { position } = useMightyMouse();
  return (
    <div>
      x:{position.client.x} y:{position.client.y}
    </div>
  );
}

We use the useMightyMouse hook to get an object with the position property.

Then we can get the mouse position as we move it with the client.x and client.y properties to get the x and y coordinates respectively.

react-hook-mousetrap

The react-hook-mousetrap library lets us watch for presses of a keyboard key combination.