Managing Focus With Refs and useEffect
Drive focus in a component-based world.
Why Focus Needs Managing
When UI appears, disappears, or updates, the keyboard focus can land in the wrong place or vanish. In React you steer it deliberately with refs and effects.
A ref Points to a DOM Node
useRef gives you a stable handle to a real element. After render, ref.current is the actual DOM node you can call .focus() on.
const inputRef = useRef(null);
<input ref={inputRef} />All lessons in this course
- Route Changes Without Page Reloads
- Managing Focus With Refs and useEffect
- Fragments, Portals, and the DOM Order Trap
- jsx-a11y and Component-Level Guardrails