Jakubantalik/thinking-orbs

thinking-orbs

Dotted thought-orb loading indicators for AI & agent UIs. Nine hand-tuned animated states, each shipped at two purpose-tuned sizes, rendered on a plain 2D canvas — no WebGL, no filters, works identically in Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

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Install

npm install thinking-orbs

Quick start

import { ThinkingOrb } from 'thinking-orbs';
function Status() {
  return ;
}

States

Nine verbs an agent can be doing, each a distinct animation:

     {/ particles on tilted orbits /}
   {/ a scan meridian sweeps a dotted globe /}
     {/ bands scramble, then click back solved /}
   {/ a waveform rolls through the rings /}
  {/ a constellation wires itself /}
     {/ three strands plait around the sphere /}
   {/ an undulating multi-band sash /}
   {/ a ring slowly morphing /}
     {/ dotted outline: circle → triangle → square /}

Sizes

Two tuned presets — separate designs, not a scale factor. 64 for chat-avatar scale, 20 for inline-text scale. Each carries its own dot count, dot size and speed tuning:

Theme

Strictly monochrome — light ink for dark backgrounds, dark ink for light backgrounds — with the mode picked automatically from the host project:

   {/ default — detects from the project /}
   {/ pin: light dots for dark backgrounds /}
  {/ pin: dark dots for light backgrounds /}

auto resolves in three layers and updates live when any of them change:

1. an ancestor data-theme="dark|light" attribute or dark/light class (the Tailwind / shadcn convention), watched via MutationObserver; 2. otherwise prefers-color-scheme, subscribed for live OS theme switches; 3. SSR-safe — the canvas paints only on the client, after the theme has resolved.

Other props

All other ` props (className, style, data-*`, …) pass through.

Accessibility & performance

• role="img" with a sensible per-state aria-label out of the box.
• prefers-reduced-motion: reduce renders a static representative frame — no animation — and still follows the live theme.
• Every instance pauses automatically when scrolled offscreen (IntersectionObserver) or when the tab is hidden, and resumes in phase — all instances share one clock.
• Plain 2D canvas arcs only: no ctx.filter, no SVG filters, no WebGL — the same pixels everywhere, cheap on low-end devices. Device-pixel-ratio capped at 2.

License

MIT © Jakub Antalik