clsx VS emotion

To make class-based Tailwind easy to use, we used the clsx library to help manipulate class names. However, using clsx and Tailwind together often doesn't work as intended.

clsx is a tiny utility for constructing className strings conditionally, I use it in conjunction with tailwind-merge which merges Tailwind CSS classes without style conflicts.

I am familiar with the library clsx although I have never used it personally. I don't often have the need for conditional classes and when I do it's usually an inline ternary expression in the style or className prop. Is that bad/good? Are there any other popular libraries other than clsx, or anti-patterns I should be aware of when doing conditional classes in React? Thanks fam

I use CLSX for all tailwind dynamic styles. Super simple, lightweight and now is almost part of every project I build haha

Clsx

https://github.com/lukeed/clsx “A tiny (228B) utility for constructing className strings conditionally.”

Then use something like clsx

For conditionally applying or removing classes, you should take a look at clsx.

clsx has better performance over the classnames package. That’s why it was created. Take a look at their benchmarks in the repo.

Hey, I'll have you know I have lots of fun using Tailwind with clsx =)

emotion [ https://emotion.sh ]

dang, I never thought about this implication, and I googled the emotionjs repo there's a currently-active open issue regarding this https://github.com/emotion-js/emotion/issues/2928

Over my years of working with React, I’ve loved using CSS-in-JS libraries like Emotion and Styled-components. However, their inherent performance overhead from injecting CSS at runtime and their incompatibility with the latest Next.js features such as App Router and React Server Components (RSC) have always been a nagging issue for me.

An early difficulty I encountered was using UI component libraries like Mantine and Material UI in the new architecture. After looking through some GitHub issues, the culprit is Emotion, a package many component libraries rely on that does not support server rendering.

In general I recommend using styled-components or emotion. These directly attach CSS to your components in a scoped way so that your CSS files aren’t stepping on each other’s toes all the time and make sure styling is colocated with the component.

I ran into this problem as well. The root cause as I understand it is emotion: https://github.com/emotion-js/emotion/issues/2928

While integrating component libraries, they may not give you full control over the order in which styles are inserted. (Example issue).

Vanilla Extract (CSS Framework) (Alternative: Emotion)