[CSS] Change the auto-placement behaviour of grid items with grid-auto-flow

We can change the automatic behaviour of what order our grid items appear. We can even re-order the items in our grid to fill available space using the dense keyword. How do we approach this using grid-auto-flow?

By default 'grid-auto-flow' is 'row'.

For example, we have this setup:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>change-the-auto-placement-behaviour-of-grid-items-with-grid-auto-flow</title>
    <style>
        .container > * {
            background-color: antiquewhite;
        }

        .container {
            display: grid;
            height: 100vh;
            grid-gap: 10px;
            grid-template-columns: repeat(4, 1fr);
            grid-template-rows: repeat(4, 1fr);
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
    <div class="grid-item">1</div>
    <div class="grid-item">2</div>
    <div class="grid-item">3</div>
    <div class="grid-item">4</div>
    <div class="grid-item">5</div>
    <div class="grid-item">6</div>
    <div class="grid-item">7</div>
    <div class="grid-item">8</div>
    <div class="grid-item">9</div>
    <div class="grid-item">10</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

It should looks like:

Notice how items flows:

1->2->3->4

5->6->7->8

9->10

Now if we change 'grid-auto-flow' to 'column':

As we can see, now the how items flows:

1 5 9

2 6 10

3 7

4 8

So after understand how item flows for 'grid-auto-flow', let's see how 'grid-auto-flow' can help us auto fill the hole.

For example we have this setup:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>change-the-auto-placement-behaviour-of-grid-items-with-grid-auto-flow</title>
    <style>
        .container > * {
            background-color: antiquewhite;
        }

        .container {
            display: grid;
            height: 100vh;
            grid-gap: 10px;
            grid-template-columns: repeat(4, 1fr);
            grid-template-rows: repeat(4, 1fr);

            grid-auto-flow: row;
        }

        .grid-item:nth-of-type(2) {
            grid-column: span 2;
        }

        .grid-item:nth-of-type(3) {
            grid-column: span 3;
        }

        .grid-item:nth-of-type(8) {
            grid-row: span 3;
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
    <div class="grid-item">1</div>
    <div class="grid-item">2</div>
    <div class="grid-item">3</div>
    <div class="grid-item">4</div>
    <div class="grid-item">5</div>
    <div class="grid-item">6</div>
    <div class="grid-item">7</div>
    <div class="grid-item">8</div>
    <div class="grid-item">9</div>
    <div class="grid-item">10</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

It looks like:

As you can see, after item 2, there is a gap which item 3 cannot fit in. In this case, we can use 'dense' to help.

Code:

grid-auto-flow: row dense;

As you can see, item 4 fill the gap after item 2.

Now last, let see 'column dense' case:
If with out 'dense', it looks like:

As you can see, it supposes to have 4 cols , but no it has 5 cols, because item 10 have no space leave. So now if we add 'column dense':

grid-auto-flow: column dense;