jetc.dev Newsletter Issue #313

Published: 2026-03-18

This week, we ponder modern bottom tab navigation, focus indicators, and rapid iteration on animations. We see a hotkey DSL and a couple of approaches for syntax highlighting. Plus, we realize that our view of the future is… hazy.

Composable Commentary

Posts, videos, and other new information related to Jetpack Compose!

Medium user chanzmao wonders whether our original approach for bottom tabs (“one back stack per tab”) is the right option, especially with Nav3. The proposed alternative keeps a single back stack for the UI, where tab switches move groups of related back operations around in that back stack.

More Accessible Focus Indicators with Compose

Eevis Panula (Mastodon, Bluesky) walks us through creating a focusIndication() modifier for providing better focus indicators: signs in the UI of where key events will go.

Haze 2.0: A Pluggable Visual Effects Engine

Chris Banes (Mastodon, Bluesky) writes about the next generation of his Haze library, as it moves from providing blur effects to providing better rendering support for background content (including blur as an option).

Medium: When Text Input Becomes Document Editing in Jetpack Compose

Sergey Drymchenko writes about Cascade Compose, explaining that ordinary text input is at most best for a single atomic chunk of text. If you have a more complex structured document than that, blending text editing with the rest of document management requires careful planning… or the right library.

Tuning Compose Animations Without Rebuilding: Hot Reload for Dynamic Design

Jaewoong Eum (Mastodon, Bluesky) demonstrates one area where “hot reload”-style development really shines: iterating over the implementation of Compose animations. You no longer need to rebuild the app — just make a change, save, and watch the revised animation in your running device.

Resource Roundup

100% pure code!

GitHub: yours-valentiine / HyperKey

GitHub user yours-valentiine created a DSL for defining hotkeys for Compose for Android and Desktop. This includes handling modifier keys, supporting chords (simultaneous keys) and sequences, and more.

GitHub: MohamedRejeb / harfbuzz-kmp

Mohamed Rejeb has created a Compose Multiplatform port of Harfbuzz for better control over the rendering of Arabic and similar languages.

GitHub: AmadeyKuspakov / VerticalScroll

GitHub user AmadeyKuspakov brings us a VerticalScroll() container that supports both non-scrollable and lazy-list content in the same container, scrolling through all of it in unison.

A Very Particular Set of Skills

Adding Compose capabilities to your coding agents!

Google’s Yuri Schimke (Mastodon, Bluesky) published https://github.com/yschimke/compose-ai-tools, which contains tools and skills to help agents validate their work, by rendering @Preview composables to PNGs outside of Android Studio.

In addition, here are a few more repositories of Compose-related coding agent skills that I encountered:

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