Thanks to Konva

I built React Native Canvas Kit because I kept wishing Konva existed for React Native. Konva is a fantastic 2D scene graph for the web canvas, and years of using it shaped how I think a canvas library should feel.

So before anything else, thank you to Anton Lavrenov and the Konva community. This library would not exist without that groundwork.

What I kept similar

I deliberately kept Canvas Kit close to Konva so that anyone who already knows Konva feels at home right away.

• The scene graph. The hierarchy is the same idea: Stage → Layer → Group → Shape. Nodes nest, transforms cascade down the tree, and each node maps onto a render node underneath.
• Prop names. Shapes take the props you would expect from Konva: x, y, width, height, radius, fill, stroke, strokeWidth, scaleX, scaleY, rotation, and so on. If you have written Konva, most of your muscle memory carries over.
• Interactivity. Events bubble through ancestors with hierarchy-aware hit testing, draggable makes a node follow the pointer, and a Transformer you point at a node draws resize and rotate handles. These mirror Konva's model closely, including the cancelBubble escape hatch on events.

What is different

The concepts are shared, but the engine is not. Canvas Kit renders with React Native Skia rather than the web <canvas>, and it drives dragging and multi-touch gestures on the UI thread with Reanimated and Gesture Handler. That lets interactions stay smooth on a phone, but it also means some things diverge from Konva where React Native and Skia call for it.

If you are coming from Konva: welcome. I hope this feels familiar. And thank you again to the Konva project for the inspiration.