Practical Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Compose Previews
summary
Shows concrete fixes: use showBackground=true and UI mode parameters to get light/dark screenshots in Android Studio, group variants with MultiPreview annotations to avoid dozens of standalone previews, and build reusable widgets like a preview box and preview column that defer composition‑local reads (pass background as a lambda) so themes render correctly. Notes tooling gaps: Compose Desktop/Multiplatform and Fleet lack annotation params, R8 strips unused previews, and screenshot testing currently needs a separate source set.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Compose Previews intro
- 1:30Why previews need code
- 4:22DevX challenges with previews
- 5:28Fix background visibility
- 7:36Custom background colors
- 10:09Dark mode previews
- 11:56Group and name previews
- 13:43Multi-preview annotations
- 15:30Compose preview templates
- 17:58Multiplatform limitations
- 19:04Theming importance in previews
- 20:28Reusable preview box
- 24:41Preview column for components
- 25:47Override composition locals
- 27:35Advanced preview tooling
- 29:01Inject composables via params
- 30:26Previews for screenshot tests
- 31:09Worth improving previews?
- 32:13Resources and closing
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