No jQuery, no React DnD — just pure JavaScript and a weekend of trial and error that paid off big in performance and flexibility.

Zain Ahmad

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Jul 3, 2025

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I was building a form builder for a client — you know, the classic drag-and-drop interface where users can add input fields, rearrange them, and customize layouts.

Most people would jump to a library like react-beautiful-dnd, but I needed:

• Zero dependencies
• Cross-browser consistency
• Full control over the drag logic

So I rolled my own. It was surprisingly doable — and today, I’m sharing how I built a vanilla JS drag-and-drop editor that still powers part of my production UI.

1. Setting Up the Drag Targets

I started with a basic list of draggable items:

<div class="item" draggable="true">Text Field</div>
<div class="item" draggable="true">Checkbox</div>
<div class="item" draggable="true">Dropdown</div>

<div class="
dropzone" id="builder"></div>

We make the elements draggable using the draggable attribute — built into HTML5.

2. Capturing the Drag Data