© 2026 Gage Sorrell. Released under the MIT license.

reactive-event

Type-safe Electron IPC functions, including modern React hooks.

Features

• Events as types ("event declarations")
• Effortless transition for main (just import { ipcMain } from "reactive-event")
• Typed React hooks with simple setup (as little as one line in your preload)
  • Also supports <Suspense> and transitions!
• Register your types with almost no boilerplate, or write no boilerplate with reactive-event-cli or the VS Code extension

Installation

Simply add reactive-event as a normal dependency,

npm install reactive-event

Recommended. Consider installing the CLI utility, reactive-event-cli to write the boilerplate for you,

npx init reactive-event

This will install the CLI, and launch the interactive setup wizard.

[!NOTE] See the CLI introduction article to learn more about using the CLI.

[!TIP] VS Code users can use the Reactive Event extension, which runs the CLI for you automatically when needed.

Documentation

The documentation is available here. It features articles, guides, examples (including a sample project), and a thorough reference.

Development

Prerequisites

| Package | Version | |--------:|:--------| | NodeJS | >=24 | | npm | >=11 |

Instructions

To extend reactive-event, simply clone the repo and install dependencies,

git clone https://github.com/GageSorrell/ReactiveEvent
cd ReactiveEvent
npm install

It is recommended to use the included sample project for prototyping,

cd Sample # From the root of the project
npm install
npm run start

and simply override the reactive-event dependency with your local copy.

Showcase

• SorrellWm: The tiling window manager for everyone. (The original motivation of this package!)