UI Beats

Supercharge your UI.

Beautifully designed, animated React components you can copy, paste, or install with the shadcn CLI.

Documentation · Components · Blog

What this is

UI Beats is a collection of animated React components built with TypeScript, Tailwind CSS and Motion.

It is not a package you install and import from. You own the code: add a component, then change whatever you like. No version pinning, no wrapper APIs, no waiting on a maintainer to expose a prop.

Install a component

npx shadcn@latest add https://uibeats.com/r/flip-card.json

The CLI writes the component into your project and installs the npm packages it needs. Every component page lists its own command, and the full index lives at /r/registry.json.

Prefer to copy and paste? Every component page has the full source under Installation → Manual.

Use it from your coding agent

Most components get picked by whatever is writing the code. The MCP server puts the whole catalogue inside Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf and anything else that speaks MCP, so your agent can search for a component and read its real props instead of guessing.

claude mcp add uibeats -- npx -y @uibeats/mcp

It exposes four tools: search_components, get_component, list_components and get_install_command. See packages/mcp or the MCP docs.

For agents that only fetch URLs, the same content is served as plain text:

Tune before you copy

Every component has a playground at /playground/<category>/<name>: the props table becomes a live control panel, the preview updates as you drag, and the snippet carries only what you actually changed. All 52 of them.

The controls are derived from the same props array that renders the documentation table, so a control can never describe a prop the docs do not.

Alongside it, Motion Studio, a cubic-bezier and spring editor. Drag the curve or tune stiffness, damping and mass, watch it run on three properties at once, and copy the Motion transition or the CSS. Springs are integrated from the same damped-oscillator model Motion uses rather than approximated with a bezier, so the preview is the motion you will ship.

Components

52 components across six categories:

Motion you can switch off

Every component honours prefers-reduced-motion. Not "most of them": the whole registry, checked in CI: tests/reduced-motion.test.ts fails the build if a component ships without consulting the preference, or reads it and then animates anyway.

What that means per component is a judgement, not a switch. An entrance is settled from the first frame. A carousel stops advancing on its own but still moves when you press the button. Flip Card still turns, because the back face is the point; it just cuts instead of sweeping.

Themed by your tokens, not ours

Components read shadcn's own variables (--card, --border, --muted-foreground), so an installed component wears your palette. The few that need a colour shadcn does not define ship it with them: cssVars in the registry item, merged into your stylesheet by the CLI. See config/tokens.ts; the build fails on a component that reads a variable nothing defines.

Local development

Requires Node 20.9+ and Yarn 4 (via Corepack).

git clone https://github.com/nikhils4/ui-beats.git
cd ui-beats
corepack enable
yarn install
yarn dev

The site runs at http://localhost:3000.

Scripts

How it fits together

yarn new:component --name flip-clock --category component

That writes the four files below, registers them in all three maps, and leaves a stub that compiles and passes the suite. The rest of this section is what it does, for when you need to do it by hand.

Adding a component means adding four files. The sidebar, the docs page, the sitemap, the command menu and the shadcn registry entry are all derived from them; there is no central list to keep in sync.

components/demo/<category>/<name>.tsx         the component itself
components/usage/<category>/<name>.usage.tsx  a runnable example
content/docs/<category>/<name>.content.ts     title, description, props table
content/docs/index.ts                         add the config to the array
components/website/component-preview.tsx      one line in the lazy preview map

Optionally a fifth, to give it a playground:

components/playground/<category>/<name>.playground.tsx   renders it from live values
components/website/playground-harnesses.tsx              one line in the lazy harness map

Everything else is generated:

• lib/registry.ts joins each config with its source on disk and derives the npm dependency list from the component's own import statements.
• lib/playground.ts turns the documented props table into controls: a string-literal union becomes a select, a number becomes a range with a bounded scale, a hex-defaulted colour prop becomes a swatch.
• lib/agent-docs.ts renders the same registry data as markdown for /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt and the per-component .md routes.
• config/side-nav.ts builds the sidebar from the same array.
• scripts/build-registry.ts emits public/r/*.json for the shadcn CLI, plus components.json for the MCP server.
• app/docs/[category]/[component]/page.tsx statically generates one page per component, with real per-page metadata.

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