Perch

A creature on the top edge of whatever you put in it: sitting there watching, or hiding behind the edge and peeking up when you come near. It reacts through its mood like every Creature, and never covers what it sits on: the space it needs above the edge is kept for it. For onboarding, an empty state's card, a success moment, a product's assistant.

Feel A small companion sitting on the edge of the card, looking at what you're doing.

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

Installation

npx echo-ui-cli add perch

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: 5.7 KB · 41.1 KB with what it imports · 1.2 KB of CSS (minified and gzipped; React not counted)
Needs: creature (Echo, brought with it)
Keyboard: Peeking comes up on hover and when focus is inside, so keyboard users see it too.
Reduced motion: One still pose; a peek appears at once.

Usage

tsx

import { Perch } from "@/echo/perch";
import { Card } from "@/echo/card";

<Perch>
  <Card title="Welcome" />
</Perch>

Composition

Perch
  Creature, on the ledge
  what it sits on

Examples

On a card

Echo sits on the corner, watching the pointer.

tsx

<Perch>
  <Card title="Welcome" description="Three steps and you're set up." />
</Perch>

Peeking

Out of sight until you're near the card.

tsx

<Perch behavior="peek" at="start">
  <Card title="Tip" description="Press ? for every shortcut." />
</Perch>

Pleased

A hop when the work is done.

tsx

<Perch mood="done">
  <Card title="All set" description="Your workspace is ready." />
</Perch>

Accessibility

The creature is hidden from assistive technology; what's in the Perch is read as it is.
It never covers content: the room it needs above the edge is kept for it, and it takes no pointer.
Peeking comes up on hover and when focus is inside, so keyboard users see it too.
Under reduced motion it holds one pose, and a peeking creature appears without rising.

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, pop
Reduced motion: One still pose; a peek appears at once.

Props

Perch props
Prop	Type	Default
`children` requiredWhat it sits on: a Card, a Panel, a Modal's body.	`unknown`
`mood`What it's doing.	`"idle" \| "busy" \| "done" \| "error" \| "sleep"`	`"idle"`
`character`Who it is: a Creature character. Default: Echo.	`unknown`
`behavior`sit on the edge; peek hides behind it and comes up when you're near.	`"sit" \| "peek"`	`"sit"`
`at`Which end of the edge.	`"start" \| "end"`	`"end"`
`size`The creature's height in px.	`number`	`56`

Anti-patterns

Never perch a creature on every card: one, on the card a moment is about.
Never let the creature carry a message: the card says it, the creature only looks the part.

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 · AddedPerch: a creature on a card's top edge. It sits there watching, or hides behind the edge and peeks up when you're near (on hover and when focus is inside). The room it needs above the edge is kept, so it never covers content.
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 · FixedOn a phone, a tapped part no longer stays lit (BUG-143). A phone leaves what you tapped under :hover until the next tap, so a table row stayed shaded and a trigger stayed lit after the finger lifted. Hover styles now apply only where there's a pointer that can hover (@media (hover: hover)), in all 23 components that had one. Checked, active and focus styles that shared a rule with them still apply everywhere.
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

Welcome

Tip