Review of Semantic UI Framework

Owned by Adam Butterworth (Deactivated)
Last updated: Apr 03, 2023 by Brian Smith
1 min read

Adam's Takeaway

Semantic UI seems like a technologically aging and dying project on life support. The community forked the project here: https://fomantic-ui.com/ with the intention of someday merging back. 


Appears to have outstanding theming capability.

See https://semantic-ui.com/usage/theming.html and an example project that uses a theme to recreate Github: https://semantic-org.github.io/example-github/. It's clear they built this with theming in mind.


Written in LESS. (sad)

Semantic UI is written in LESS which surfaces two issues:

  1. We already use SCSS so there's complexity and cost to making a switch.
  2. create-react-app supports SCSS but not LESS. You have to leave the beaten path to get it to work.

You could argue that this is a good thing since it would force us to separate our theme/patterns from application style. Not a strong argument though I think.


Themes are compiled and used as CSS.

This makes developing the theme less intuitive than others like Bootstrap or Carbon.

Ran down a rabbit hole trying to get a version I can build and use with React in a project. I'm following this tutorial: https://jsramblings.com/2018/03/04/how-to-use-semantic-ui-with-a-custom-theme-in-your-CRA-app.html but it looks like gulp v4 broke something to do with gulp-help so it doesn't work.

https://github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic-UI-LESS/issues/10 This issue about basic problems of including semantic LESS files in an npm project has been open for two years and still not fixed. It seems like Semantic UI is not "with the times" and sticking to other build/development systems (gulp, less, poor npm packaging).


— Several hours pass trying to get a reasonable setup and I gave up —