tinky-theme

The flexible, type-safe theming engine for Tinky

tinky-theme provides a robust architecture for building themeable React components. It decouples component logic from visual styling using a powerful slot-based system, enabling deeply customizable UIs without the maintenance headache.

Designed for scalability, it supports global overrides, dynamic prop-based styling, and automatic deep merging—all fully typed with TypeScript.

Features

• 🧩 Slot-Based Architecture: Define independent styles for every part of a component (e.g., root, label, icon).
• 🎨 Dynamic Styling: Use functions to drive styles based on component props (e.g., disabled, variant).
• ⚡ Global Overrides: Instantly rebrand components application-wide via a simple context provider.
• 🔄 Smart Deep Merging: User overrides intelligently merge with default themes—change a color without resetting the padding.
• 📐 TypeScript First: First-class type definitions ensuring autocompletion and type safety for your custom themes.

Installation

Install the package via your preferred package manager:

npm install tinky-theme
# or
yarn add tinky-theme
# or
pnpm add tinky-theme

Note: This package requires react (>=16.8.0) and tinky as peer dependencies.

Key Concepts

1. The Component Theme

A Component Theme acts as the blueprint for a component's appearance. It is divided into two main sections:

• styles: Not just a single style object, but a collection of styles targeting specific slots (internal parts) of the component. Each slot can be a static object or a dynamic function.
• config: Non-visual settings (e.g., animation speeds, default icon sets) that consumers might want to override globally.

2. The Slot System

Instead of prop drilling dozens of style props (labelStyle, containerStyle), tinky-theme maps styles to semantic names.

Example component structure:

• root: The outer container.
• icon: The visual indicator.
• label: The text content.

Users can target these specific slots in their theme overrides.

Usage Guide

Step 1: Defining a Component's Default Theme

When you build a component, you define its "contract" by exporting a default theme. This sets the baseline look and feel.

import type { ComponentTheme } from "tinky-theme";

// 1. Define your component props
interface BadgeProps {
  variant?: "solid" | "subtle";
  status?: "success" | "warning" | "error";
  children: React.ReactNode;
}

// 2. Create the default theme definition
const defaultBadgeTheme: ComponentTheme<BadgeProps> = {
  styles: {
    // Dynamic style function for the root container
    root: (props) => ({
      display: "inline-flex",
      padding: "4px 8px",
      borderRadius: "4px",
      // Change color based on status prop
      backgroundColor: props.status === "success" ? "green" : "red",
      opacity: props.variant === "subtle" ? 0.8 : 1,
    }),
    // Static style for the text label
    label: {
      fontSize: "0.875rem",
      fontWeight: 600,
      color: "white",
    },
  },
};

Step 2: Consuming the Theme

Inside your component, use the useComponentTheme hook to resolve the final styles. This hook automatically merges the default theme with any global context overrides.

import { useComponentTheme } from "tinky-theme";
import { Box, Text } from "tinky";

export function Badge(props: BadgeProps) {
  // 3. Resolve the theme
  const theme = useComponentTheme("Badge", defaultBadgeTheme, props);

  return (
    // 4. Apply styles to slots
    <Box {...theme.styles?.root}>
      <Text {...theme.styles?.label}>{props.children}</Text>
    </Box>
  );
}

Step 3: Overriding Globally

Consumers of your library can override specific parts of the component without rewriting the CSS.

import { ThemeProvider, type Theme } from "tinky-theme";

// Define an application-level theme
const appTheme: Theme = {
  components: {
    Badge: {
      styles: {
        root: {
          // Override just the border radius, keep everything else
          borderRadius: "999px",
          textTransform: "uppercase",
        },
      },
    },
  },
};

function App() {
  return (
    <ThemeProvider theme={appTheme}>
      <Badge status="success">Approved</Badge>
    </ThemeProvider>
  );
}

API Documentation

useComponentTheme

function useComponentTheme<P>(
  componentName: string,
  defaultTheme: ComponentTheme<P>,
  props: P,
): ComponentTheme<P>;

Returns: A resolved theme object where all functions are executed and merged.

• componentName: The unique key used in the global theme registry.
• defaultTheme: The fallback styles defined by the component author.
• props: The current props, passed to style functions to generate dynamic values.

ThemeProvider

A wrapper component that injects the theme context.

<ThemeProvider theme={myTheme}>
  <App />
</ThemeProvider>

Prop	Type	Description
theme	Partial<Theme>	The global theme object. Can be updated dynamically.
children	ReactNode	The app or component tree.

extendTheme

A utility to deep-merge standard themes with user customizations.

const finalTheme = extendTheme(baseTheme, userOverrides);

Advanced Usage

TypeScript Integration

tinky-theme exports all necessary types (Theme, ComponentTheme, StyleObject) to ensure your theme definitions are type-checked.

Conflict Resolution

When merging styles:

1. Global Overrides take precedence over Default Themes.
2. Dynamic Prop Styles are re-evaluated on every render if props change.
3. Deep Merging is used, so valid nested properties (like config) are merged rather than replaced, unless a conflict occurs at a primitive level.

License

MIT © ByteLand Technology Limited