Styled widgets (StyledText, StyledIcon...) don't work like Box widgets

[Maksimka101]

It seems strange to me that the StyledText and FlexBox widgets accept Style, but only FlexBox processes $box attributes, while StyledText quietly ignores them. Firstly, it's very unpleasant to pass an attribute that isn't applied. Secondly, it's inconvenient that to create a decorator for Row, you can use HBox, but to create a decorator for Text, you need to use Box + StyledText. And in general, it's strange that modifiers apply to everything, context variants also always work, but $box works almost always. Why not follow the idea through and create TextBox, ImageBox, and IconBox so that the $box attribute always works?

And secondly, most importantly, I did not notice any mention in the documentation that Styled widgets do not work with the $box attribute

So, my question is: should absolutely any widget from the mix package support the $box attribute?

[leoafarias]

@Maksimka101 Thanks for the feedback; we have a work-in-progress PR to allow modifiers per Spec.

Regarding your question, the plan is to try to have a 1-to-1 mapping of the utilities. I believe FlexBox is the only exception to this.

If you have a $box and $text in the same style, you can pass them to the widget Box and StyledText, and their attributes will be resolved.

However, StyledText and StyledIcon inherit $text and $icon attributes passed straight to Box.

[tilucasoli]

Recently, we merged a PR (#517) that introduced a utility specific for FlexBox. Now, you can write your styles, such as:

$flexBox.chain
  ..alignment.center()
  ..padding(10)
  ..margin(10)
  ..flex.mainAxisAlignment.center()
  ..crossAxisAlignment.center()