UI Patterns

poi UI Patterns and Constraints

Never unmount inactive tabs or fleet decks

Inactive main tabs, plugin tabs, and fleet decks must stay mounted — some plugins rely on in-component React state that would be lost on unmount. The user explicitly rejected conditional mounting as a performance fix.

Hide them with content-visibility: hidden instead: it preserves layout state and skips rendering. Applied in views/components/tab-area/tab-contents-union.tsx (PoiTabChildPositioner) and views/components/ship-parts/styled-components.tsx (ShipDeck), replacing the older & > div { display: none }.

Also deferred by the user: performance fixes that change visuals — backdrop-filter blur, text-shadows, mask-image, transition: all, tooltip count. Do not "clean these up" without asking.

Capturing a previous value for a CSS transition

Use a useLayoutEffect cleanup to capture the outgoing value before a dependency changes. The cleanup closure holds the old value and runs synchronously before paint (and before the new effect body), so the state update lands before the transition's first paint.

const [prevFleetId, setPrevFleetId] = useState<number | null>(null)

useLayoutEffect(() => {
  return () => {
    setPrevFleetId(activeFleetId) // cleanup fires with the old value before re-running
  }
}, [activeFleetId])

This avoids three problems at once:

1. No setState during render (React's getDerivedStateFromProps pattern) — the user prefers not to use it, even though the React docs allow it.
2. No react-hooks/set-state-in-effect lint error — setState inside the cleanup return is not flagged, only direct calls in the effect body are.
3. No useEffect flash — useLayoutEffect cleanup runs synchronously before paint.

Pair it with a handleTransitionEnd callback that resets the value to null once the CSS transition finishes, removing the outgoing element from active rendering.

backdrop-filter needs the external SVG filter

In poi's vibrant (transparent) Electron window, backdrop-filter: blur(...) and the other CSS filter functions do not produce a blur — the backdrop is semi-transparent, so the plain functions composite to nothing visible.

The working construct is an external SVG file reference:

backdrop-filter: url('../svg/ui/filter.svg#blur');

Do not replace the SVG-filter structure in assets/css/blueprint-vibrant.css with CSS filter functions. Tune either the filter chain in assets/svg/ui/filter.svg (#blur) or the CSS properties around it.

The #blur chain un-premultiplies alpha, dilates and blurs RGB, clips to a blurred dilated alpha mask, re-boosts opacity, then saturates by 1.25 — the OS acrylic recipe. The tint layered on top lives in --poi-vibrancy-tint (per theme), kept separate from --bp-surface-background-color-default-rest so blurred surfaces can be darkened toward the native look without affecting buttons, inputs, or cards.

Verify blur/vibrancy changes with the visual-verification skill — they cannot be checked from tests.