Is it safe to use ListKeyboardDelegate in custom components?

[timurmaio]

Hi team,

I'm building a custom Select component using react-aria, and I'm relying on ListBox for the list UI. I need to control focus manually (e.g., via aria-activedescendant) and handle keyboard navigation myself.

I came across the ListKeyboardDelegate class, which seems to work well for things like getKeyBelow, getKeyAbove, etc. However, I noticed that it's not part of the public documentation, so I assume it's considered internal.

My question is:
Is it safe to use ListKeyboardDelegate in my own component, or is it likely to break in a future release?
I'm trying to stick as closely as possible to internal patterns to avoid reimplementing keyboard logic, but I also want to avoid relying on unstable APIs.

Thanks in advance!

[devongovett]

It is shown in some public documentation examples so we do consider it a stable API.

need to control focus manually (e.g., via aria-activedescendant) and handle keyboard navigation myself.

Could you describe more about your use-case? Autocomplete is potentially related as it also uses virtual focus.

[timurmaio]

Thanks for pointing that out. I learned about this new component, and it fit my use case perfectly.
I initially asked about delegates because I needed to create a component I call Picker that can handle two scenarios: a popover with search in a list, and a popover with search in a tree.

At first, I considered your Tree component, but I ran into an issue — it couldn’t be controlled with virtual focus. So I ended up implementing my own Tree component that uses the Tree View pattern, as opposed to your Tree Grid, because I found it to be a better fit for my case.

Now I have two components, but it’s still better for me than reimplementing everything from scratch. I’m glad that react-aria provides that level of flexibility.