When should usePress be used, given that useButton exists?

[samselikoff]

Hey there, amazing library + documentation!

I'm curious about what the use case is for usePress. It seems that anything "pressable" should be a button, and therefore useButton should be used for the additional features and semantics it provides.

Could someone give some advice around what the appropriate use cases are for usePress?

Thanks!

[reidbarber]

Good question! It usually wouldn't be used by itself, but more likely would be used for handling press interaction within other ARIA patterns. For instance, a radio button requires press interaction, but doesn't have button semantics, so our useRadio hook uses it.

If you search the codebase for usePress, you'll see where it gets used within other hooks.

[snowystinger]

Just to add to that, we use it to implement all of our menu items, picker items, and table rows, which also are not buttons. Those are all implemented by useSelectableItem https://github.com/adobe/react-spectrum/blob/main/packages/%40react-aria/selection/src/useSelectableItem.ts#L267

[samselikoff]

I see. Thank you both for such a quick response!

So just to be absolutely sure I'm thinking about it right, if I were making a button using React Aria, useButton would always be the way to go – correct?

[reidbarber]

Correct! Definitely go with useButton.

[snowystinger]

if it should be role=button or is a button element then you should consider using useButton, but there may be exceptions. For example, we use usePress to implement our useCalendarCell's buttonProps which has a role 'button' but is more complex than your ordinary button. A good rule of thumb though is that if it's a button, you should start by using useButton and then if usability testing shows some deficiencies, you can log an issue and contribute a fix here or you can implement what you need using usePress.

[samselikoff]

Makes sense. Thanks again for all the info, really loving this project + appreciate all the work you all have put into it! 🍻