React Custom Hook: useHover
In this article series, we embark on a journey through the realm of custom React hooks, discovering their immense potential for elevating your development projects. Our focus today is on the "useHover" hook, one of the many carefully crafted hooks available in the collection of React custom hooks.
This lightweight hook leverages the useState and useEventListener hooks from React to keep track of the hover state. By simply passing a ref to the useHover hook, you can start receiving accurate hover events. The hook listens for "mouseover" and "mouseout" events, updating the hovered state accordingly.
One of the key advantages of useHover is its simplicity and reusability. By encapsulating the hover logic within the hook, you can easily use it across multiple components without duplicating code. This promotes clean and maintainable code, saving you time and effort in the long run.
UseHover can be used in a variety of scenarios. Whether you need to highlight an element on hover, trigger additional actions, or dynamically change styles, this custom hook has got you covered. It provides a seamless way to enhance the interactivity and user experience of your React components.
To demonstrate its power, consider the HoverComponent example above. By applying the useHover hook to the elementRef, the background color of the div dynamically changes between blue and red depending on the hover state. This simple yet effective implementation showcases the potential of useHover in creating interactive and engaging UI components.
Highlight and dynamically change styles are both examples that can easily be accomplished by CSS. If you can do it with CSS, do it with CSS. Javascripts hogs the main thread and is the most expensive resource available.
However, the React Custom Hook "useHover" is designed to offer more than just basic styling changes. While CSS's ":hover" is excellent for straightforward style adjustments, the "useHover" hook becomes particularly useful when you want to go beyond simple styling changes and incorporate more complex behavior based on hover events.
For instance, imagine you not only want to change the background color of an element on hover but also trigger an API request or toggle some other component's state. In such cases, the "useHover" hook can provide a structured way to manage these interactions without cluttering your component with event listeners and logic.