Magnetic

The HardwareButtons inside it feel your hand before you touch them: each leans toward the pointer and comes up a little, the nearest most, and springs home when you move away. It moves the button as a whole, never the cap, so pressing still presses.

Feel It answers before you touch it.

Or let the agent fetch it: get_component("magnetic") on the Echo MCP server.

Installation

npx echo-ui-cli add magnetic

First time? Run npx echo-ui-cli init once — it sets the project up, and add refuses to run before it.

At a glance

Version: 0.3.0
Weight: 878 B · 27.9 KB with what it imports · 219 B of CSS (minified and gzipped; React not counted)
Needs: hardware-button (Echo, brought with it)
Reduced motion: Nothing leans.
Sound: None of its own; each cap's press is its own.

Usage

tsx

import { Magnetic } from "@/echo/magnetic";
import { HardwareButton } from "@/echo/hardware-button";

<Magnetic>
  <HardwareButton iconOnly aria-label="Record" icon={micIcon} />
</Magnetic>

Composition

Magnetic → your HardwareButtons, moved as a whole (translate, scale)

Examples

A dock

Icon-only caps in a row.

tsx

<Magnetic>
  <HardwareButton iconOnly aria-label="Home" icon={homeIcon} />
  <HardwareButton iconOnly aria-label="Search" icon={searchIcon} />
</Magnetic>

Accessibility

It changes nothing about the buttons but where they are: names, roles and focus are theirs.
Pointer only — touch has no hover — and nothing leans under reduced motion.

Tested against WCAG 2.2 AA on every release:

axe — No axe violations, in the component's own gallery and on its page.
keyboard — Every action is reachable and operable from the keyboard alone.
focus-visible — Focus is visible on every focusable part, in normal and forced-colors mode.
forced-colors — State stays visible when the look's colours are replaced by the system's.
target-size — Every target's real hit area is at least 24×24px, at every density.
reflow — Content reflows into 320px and survives a doubled text size.

Not covered: screen-reader: not yet verified by a person. Everything above is a machine check; a person has not yet driven this component with a screen reader.

Motion & sound

Motion tokens: springs
Reduced motion: Nothing leans.
Sound: None of its own; each cap's press is its own.

Props

Magnetic props
Prop	Type	Default
`children` requiredHardwareButtons, usually icon-only ones in a row.	`unknown`
`radius`How far away a button starts to feel the hand, px. Defaults to 130.	`number`
`strength`How far it leans, as a share of the distance to the hand. Defaults to 0.4.	`number`

Anti-patterns

Never put text buttons in a dense form inside it: a target that moves is harder to hit.
Never set a radius so large that buttons lean while the hand is going somewhere else.

Changelog

v0.3.0 · 2026-10-12 · ChangedEvery item needs echo-ui-core 0.3.0 (all components). The drawn device, readability past AA and the design tests live in core, and the components that use them are built against it, so each item now declares echo-ui-core >=0.3.0 <0.4.0. Update core with the items: npm install echo-ui-core@^0.3.0 (or your package manager's), then npx echo-ui-cli update. An item whose files didn't change is the same code under a new version; the 0.2.0 files stay published.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · AddedSix other kinds of physics. PullCord is a switch you pull: the cord stretches, clicks at a detent and changes as you let go. SplitFlap is a readout that turns over flap by flap. LightSource makes your pointer the light the HardwareButtons inside it are lit by. Magnetic makes the buttons inside lean toward your hand before you touch them. ThrowStack is a stack of Panels you flick away with the speed you gave them. Ripple is a surface that sends a wave from where you press. All of them are built from Echo's own caps, panels and roles, have a keyboard path, and hold still under reduced motion.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedComments only, no behaviour change. Comments in the component source used to cite documents, milestones and ticket numbers from Echo's own planning, none of which exist in your project. The citations are gone and the sentences around them stay. Where a comment was only a citation, it now says what it meant. Three development warnings (HardwareButton's engraved/caption checks and StatusDot's missing-label check) also dropped the ticket code at the end of the message. echo-ui diff will show changes in most items; none of them are to code.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedAn item's version is now a function of declared data, not of how the changelog is formatted. The version an item ships under is published once and never rewritten, and it used to be inferred from prose: a regex for a bolded "Breaking" run across the whole unreleased section, and attribution by "does a bullet mention this name in backticks". One breaking entry therefore moved every item that changed that cycle, and an entry explaining that "Menu and Sheet are unchanged here" filed itself as a change to Menu and Sheet — which it really had.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedThe agent brief says Echo has not shipped. llms.txt and the MCP server's instructions led with npx echo-ui-cli init, and that name on npm is a reserved stub with no executable — so a model following the brief wrote an install step that fails with npx's own error. The brief now opens with the caveat, and the docs carry it on every surface that shows a command. One switch (CLI_RELEASED) silences all of them at launch, and a test refuses to let one move without the others. Affects all components only in what the brief says about installing them; no item's props, CSS or rendered semantics change.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedEcho's home is echo-ui.com. The registry, the docs and the packages all move to it from echo.nawwara.studio. Nothing was published under the old host, so no echo.json anywhere points at it and there is nothing to migrate — this is the last release where that is true.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedWeights, line heights, letter-spacing, z-index, border widths and icon sizes come from the theme scales in all components, with the old value as a fallback, so components keep working with echo-ui-core@0.0.1. Strays moved to the nearest step: most by under a pixel; HardwareButton icons are 14/16/20px (were 15/17/19).
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · FixedContent now reflows into a 320px screen (400% zoom) and survives a doubled browser text size (WCAG 1.4.10, 1.4.4), across all components. Select's 180px floor, NumberField's readout, Segmented and Steps as flex items, EmptyState's grid columns, and Avatar's fixed-pixel disc all gave way; Panel counts its padding inside a width you set (box-sizing: border-box), so a <Panel style={{ width: 220 }}> is now 220px wide overall rather than 260px.

Preview