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interactions@Ibelick

Don't Rebuild Keyboard Behavior

NEVER

NEVER: Rebuild keyboard or focus behavior by hand unless explicitly requested. Use established primitives. Hand-rolled accessibility is usually incomplete.

Avoid manually implementing keyboard navigation and focus management that libraries handle correctly

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Manual keyboard handling is error-prone. Hand-rolled versions routinely miss RTL arrow direction, skipping disabled items, type-ahead search, focus restoration on close, and roving tabindex. The escape hatch in the rule is real, though: if someone explicitly asks for custom behavior a primitive cannot express, build it — deliberately, not by accident.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.