useWindowOrientation

• Installation
• Usage
• Options
• Caveats
• Contributing
• Related projects

Sometimes, just knowing the window width isn't enough. Sometimes you want to know if the window's orientation is portrait or landscape. Good thing you found this React hook.

Installation

npm install use-window-orientation
# OR
yarn add use-window-orientation

Usage

After importing the hook...

import useWindowOrientation from "use-window-orientation";

...call it from the top level of your React function.

const { orientation, portrait, landscape } = useWindowOrientation();

This hook returns an object with three properties, each describing the current orientation of the window in a different way.

• orientation will be either "portrait" or "landscape"
• portrait will be either true or false
• landscape will be either false or true

The easiest way to access these properties is by using object destructuring, as in the above example. One advantage of this method is that you only have to declare variables for the properties you actually want to use. Only plan on using the portrait boolean in your code? Then just call the hook like this:

const { portrait } = useWindowOrientation();

What's this hook good for? Say you have two components, Chart and Explanation. You want Explanation to come first if the window is portrait, but you want Chart to come first if the window is landscape. Then arrange them in your JSX like this:

{portrait && <Explanation />}
<Chart />;
{landscape && <Explanation />}

Or say you want to creep out your users by divining the orientation of their window:

<p>Well, your window is {orientation} right now, so you leave me no choice.</p>

The possibilities are endless.

Options

This hook has one optional parameter: an options object. There is currently only one option, defaultOrientation, the default orientation you'd like to return if no window exists (such as if a search engine is crawling your page). Valid defaultOrientations are "portrait" or "landscape", and if you omit the option, it will default to "portrait".

const { orientation, portrait, landscape } = useWindowOrientation({
  defaultOrientation: "portrait",
});

Caveats

This hook only deals with the window orientation, not the device orientation. It calculates this orientation using window.innerWidth and window.innerHeight. It does not consult window.orientation at all because that feature has been deprecated.

Also, in the rare case that the window's width and height are equal, useWindowOrientation will just report the orientation as portrait.

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to this project (which would be awesome), the easiest way to set it up would be to install the GitHub CLI and then run the following:

gh repo fork tywmick/use-window-orientation --clone=true
cd use-window-orientation
npm install

Now, you can build the package with npm run build, build and watch for changes with npm run dev (automatically rebuilding on each change in the source), run the test suite with npm run test, and create pull requests with gh pr create.

After building the package, you can test it in another project on your machine by adding the local path as a dependency (e.g., by running npm install /path/to/local/use-window-orientation in that other project).

Related projects

• useWindowWidthBreakpoints