chic-modules VS classnames

Another week, another announcement. While the wind may have been taken out of my sails by Facebook talking about their own styling solution, I'm pleased to announce that my own take on managing components styles in React has reached stable status. Introducing Chic Modules!

The component needs the classname dependency and a search icon which I referenced to work. So install the classname package and download the search icon below.

classnames: Makes dynamic CSS class application a breeze. Learn more

But of course, it is a button, so it could have multiple variants: primary and secondary(you can increase the number of customizable params, but we will limit it to 1, variant). To implement this you can use any library for combining classnames, for example, classnames, clsx. Let’s use the classic one, "classnames".

Use classnames and you can comma delimited your class names where needed.

To get started with our image modal implementation, i'll assume you already have a React project set up. For UI i’m using Tailwind CSS. But you can use any UI library as your wish. For the image cropping and rotating functionality, we'll be utilizing the react-easy-crop library. This library provides a simple and intuitive way to crop and interact with images and videos within a React component. We will also use the heroicons and classnames libraries in our tutorial. To install all the libraries and their dependencies, open your terminal and navigate to your project's directory. Run the following command:

Save yourself some headache and use https://github.com/JedWatson/classnames

There is an NPM module called classnames that makes this a bit easier: https://www.npmjs.com/package/classnames

To use the global Tailwind types from styles/cssClasses.d.ts, I've leveraged a lot of work from this post, so credit goes there for a lot of the complex TypeScript wizardry that makes things work. In essence, it builds upon the classnames (or clsx) to provide a helper function that gives us with the type safety we're after. This cleverness means we get type checking that works with whitespace, multiple classes (e.g., "container p-5")and arbitrary values (e.g., "border-[5px]"). The input "container p-5 invalid-class" provides the nifty error message:

but I wouldn't recommend it, because I think the point of using tailwind is to not having to abstract class into component based style. it even better to write tailwind classes into the html directly and to use tailwind-fun sparingly and only if you needed to add logic to your classes. tailwind-fun purpose is more like of https://www.npmjs.com/package/classnames rather than any other css library

Use the classnames library, that way I can group the utility classes together (one line) and break them up into multiple lines, and additionally have some of them be conditional based on variables/parameters;