HN Reader

It looks good, but I'll be honest, it's hard for me to consider $299/$799 if I can buy a beautiful theme off of somewhere like ThemeForest for $20 or $30 and toss it into an LLM to get the files parsed into components and templates.

This definitely does fill a gap that Rails has. I love using it but man I can't make a nice looking front end to save my life. We've used Tailwind UI a ton but thats kind of a foot gun because you end up slightly tweaking classes all over the place if you're not disciplined.

I've launched 3 Rails SaaS products in the last 6 months, all profitable. In the world of LLMs things like this feel less valuable. I can kick off a Claude Code prompt and in 1 hour have a decent design system with Rails components.

Things like this likely need to be AI-first moving forward. This feels built for humans.

If you’re showing off a UI framework, I shouldn’t be accidentally scrolling left and right on the page on mobile / my iPhone. Couldn’t be bothered to scroll down the page to look at components while accidentally activating horizontal scrolling.

Full-stack Rails has been my day job pretty much exclusively for almost twenty years now, for both long-term projects and one-offs in agency contexts. So I am generally interested.

Two things put me off:

1) I have to hunt around to find out whether this would fit into my project, dependency and workflow-wise — turns out it doesn't. I use neither Hotwire nor Tailwind, and "latest Rails point release only" is a rather harsh restriction too.

IMO, this information should replace the fluffy marketing speak in "Who is Rails UI for?" right at the top of railsui.com/docs .

2) Absolutely every paid product should have a pricing link in the top nav, spelled out in large, friendly letters. If the landing page only implicitly implies "paid product" but is then going to be sneaky about that fact, I close the tab and do not come back; in this case, I only stuck around because it's a Show HN.

Oh, and _that_ perennial topic ... a subscription? No thank you. Especially for the kind of money you're asking, I expect a perpetual license for the version at time of purchase, plus at least a year of updates.

All together: not for me. Best of luck to you!

Good to see work in non-AI world and for Rails!

I would make it clear in the landing page that the components are for demonstration purposes by adding a title like "For example" before them.

The above the fold looks a bit packed right now. I would leave the login box out until user presses top right as it's for retentive users only.

Broken in Safari on iphone. For example:

- table background moves left when table is scrolled horizontally

- actions in table and dropdown do nothing on tap

- text on buttons is selectable (really?)

Wow, didn't realize that you're the one behind the Webcrunch channel. Never got into Rails but I loved your Affinity videos back in the day, you're also one of the functional CSS/Tailwind early adopters on YT.

That's where I discovered TW back in 2018 I think. It was even before the Refactoring UI book and videos and the first official version of TW.

I wish I could use this – unfortunately UI frameworks are a political problem at every company I've worked at. The designers feel undermined or threatened by it, and product owners want to dictate design. Despite the massive productivity benefits of a UI framework, I've never been able to convince stakeholders to actually adopt one.

Hmm, Rails, I wonder if the UI will work well.

I open https://railsui.com/components.

I click on the different components. They switch to a random component after a while.

My confidence in Rails for UI stays were it was :)

Did a quick search and no-one has flagged a11y/colour/contrast but the animating effect for the brand colour often had a colour contrast around the 1.0 range.

I have hardware acceleration disabled in Firefox and my 5800X spins up trying to render the background wave. At least that's a known choice I made.

I'm so tired of this kind of design -- that basic dev tool splash page/Tailwind-y/Shadcdn UI thing that's just seemingly everywhere nowadays. It's so basic and tired, like Material Design without any of the little bits of personality that make it decent.

Give me some life and color and personality, damn it.

This is interesting to me as someone who worked with Rails a good deal back in the day and has interest in picking it back up.

Any chance of some themes that bring in a little dimension? Doesn't have to be early 2010s Bootstrap or anything but some subtle, crisp drop shadows and gentle gradients would be welcome.

Additionally, is unused Tailwind CSS shaken out or does it all come along for the ride?

Waiting for something similar but without Tailwind and with native elements.

i don't get these types of products anymore. i think they're useful in their own way, but i can literally create styles with claude/gemini in a heartbeat and not have to pay some insane fee.

I think you missed a trick not naming it Railwind UI.

I don't do a lot of rails, is this meant to be very drop-in? How generic is the CSS? Asking as a Django developer. ;)

Laravel has - Flux UI [0]

Personally though I use rails - I just opt for Bootstrap, otherwise just inertia + PrimeVue

if you really wanna have dope components such as shad whatever - then of course you can always opt for Rails + Inertia React + Component library

[0]: https://fluxui.dev/docs/installation

maybe I'm just dumb but a lot of these elements don't seem to work? the "..." buttons don't open any flyout, the dropdown doesn't open up...

otherwise looks cool though

Looks great, and honestly not sure why something like this doesn't come out of the box in rails (it includes the kitchen sink for the most part sans ui)

One suggestion I'd make is to disable the autorotation of ui elements on your main page, it's unintuitive and has a frustratingly short timeout before cycling to the next ui element.

Is this another Tailwind wrapper? Yes, it is.

is this daisy for rails?

300$/year is the cheapest option for a solo dev? seriously?

I'm generally in favor of "Show HN" posts that are products, but this post just seems like blatant advertising.

Rails is best as an API only, that's where it shines for me like no other tool.

im always surprised that Rails is still relevant

i havent used it since 2006 opting for php and django

i might give it another shot, any reason you like this more than django or other frameworks

ugh this looks dated even by 2016 standards

when will developers learn UI actually matters

bootstrap was a mistake, and lowered the bar for everyone

I used this about a year ago when I went through a short Rails phase. I was a bit surprised not to see more Rails-specific UI libraries considering how batteries-included the rest of the framework is, and at the time I didn't really 'get' tailwind. I'm not in a Rails phase anymore, but nice work on the library!