Muhammed Senussi
Muhammed Senussi
  • Muhammed Senussi
Angular Material or Roll Your Own?Angular

Component libraries are usually rejected on visual grounds and regretted on behavioural ones.

What you are really buying

A production select handles typeahead, arrow keys, Home and End, escape, focus return, active descendant semantics, touch, and what happens when the list is longer than the viewport. Every one of those is a small piece of work and together they are several months you did not plan for.

When building your own is right

  • Your design language is genuinely far from Material and theming it becomes a fight against specificity.
  • You need a handful of components rather than a suite.
  • You have someone who will own accessibility as a responsibility, not a task.

The middle path that has worked best for me is a headless library for behaviour with your own markup and styles. You keep full visual control and you do not re-implement two decades of accumulated keyboard conventions.

1 Comments

  • Sanne de Vries

    April 14, 2026

    Rejected on visual grounds and regretted on behavioural ones. I have lived this exact sentence twice.

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