Responsive Vertical Navigation Tabs for Boostrap 5

A stylesheet that implements vertically-oriented navigation tabs with Bootstrap 5.

This package is an update for Bootstrap 5 of the previous bootstrap vertical tabs package.

Version 2 changes

Now when the view becames very narrow (e.g. when viewing on a smartphone) the tabs turn into an accordion instead of nav-pill like buttons. This should provide a better mobile experience.

Installation

This package depends on Bootstrap 5, so it is assumed that you already have it installed and/or included in your HTML.

You can use this package either by directly embedding its pre-built (in the dist folder) stylesheet in your HTML after the boostrap styles like this:

<link
    rel="stylesheet"
    href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap-5-vertical-tabs@2.0.0/dist/b5vtabs.min.css"
    integrity="sha384-AsoWNxsuu73eGp2MPWHa77155fyqP9rueKOeG4t2d/AD4eyBqL20TClzfbAkrul4"
    crossorigin="anonymous"
/>

or (recommended) install and build it yourself:

npm install bootstrap-5-vertical-tabs sass clean-css-cli --save-dev

Building

This assumes that you use SCSS stylesheets.

1. In your stylesheet either:

@import "bootstrap-5-vertical-tabs/scss/custom-variables";
@import "bootstrap-5-vertical-tabs/scss/responsive-vertical-tabs";

or (recommended) define your own values for the custom variables, and then @import responsive-vertical-tabs.scss.

It requires the following variables to be defined:

• $vertical-tabs-min - this value specifies the minimum view width for display of vertical tabs, below this width vertical tabs turn into regular horizontal tabs:

• $horizontal-tabs-min - if the view is narrower than this value, horizontal tabs turn into an accordion:

NOTE: If you expect some long text in your tabs, wrap it in a block element with the ellipsis class inside the accordion <button>:

<div class="ellipsis">
  Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch
</div>

• $fixed-tab-size - specify this based on the expected text length to be displayed on the tabs. A (long) text that (always) fits into a vertical tab, will get ellipsis-ed when it doesn't fit into horizontal or sideways tabs:

Vertical	Horizontal	Sideways

changing the value of this variable can allow you to control if and how tab captions might be truncated. The recommended values are between 4 and 12 rem. Once that is set, the ellipsis-ing for tabs takes place automatically without the need for any additional classes.

• $left-tabs-text-align and $right-tabs-text-align - these specify the text alignment for vertical left/right tabs. When tabs are displayed as horizontal or nav-pills, the text is always center-aligned.

Check the custom-variables.scss stylesheet for the default values.

2. Compile with sass

npx sass --load-path=node_modules <input>.scss <output>.css

Minify if needed:

npx cleancss -o <output>.min.css --input-source-map <input>.css

where the output of the first command works as input for the second.

Usage

There are 3 classes defined in the stylesheet which should be applied to the element having nav-tabs bootstrap class: left-tabs, right-tabs, and sideways-tabs:

Left	Right
left-tabs	right-tabs
sideways-tabs (with left-tabs)	sideways-tabs (with right-tabs)

There are few additional classes that you need to use:

• vtabs -- add this class to the element that contains all vertical tabs. This establishes a scope for modifications applied to some of the Bootstrap's classes.

• ellipsis -- add this to this to a block child of the <button> elements used in the accordion implementation if your text is too long to fit the button.

• tab-clickable -- add this to the block element that renders the tab. This is necessary because Bootstrap 5 uses <button type="button"> for tabs, but <button> doesn't work for vertical orientation, and applying type="button" to another element (e.g. <div>) will render it in Safari as an "early 21st century style" button, with gray gradient, border, etc. Therefore don't set type="button", but use this class instead.

Use the index.html file in the dist directory as a template for your own application.

You can also see the live demo.