react-styleguidist VS styled-components

react-styleguidist

My most popular open source project, React Styleguidist, has over 10K stars on GitHub, and yet, I couldn’t manage to build a community around it, and to make it self-sufficient. The project is too big for one person to build it, and to manage issues and pull requests.

React Styleguidist is a tool that generates a living style guide for React components. This tool helps developers to document and showcase their components, making it easier for other developers to understand and use them. You can visit its official website to learn more: https://react-styleguidist.js.org/.

Because documentation is so important, our sample project has been preconfigured with React Styleguidist, a development environment for building React components. We’ll use this tool to document the components as we build them out.

Today I had to present my work on a React Native app for the last 2 months in a meeting in front of the CEO. He was pleased with my work the only critique was more comments and documentation. Afterward my immediate supervisor told me to look up "Documentation Style Guides". He said he's not concerned which pattern I chose just learn one and stick with it. After searching I found this https://react-styleguidist.js.org/documenting which seems to address what I'm looking for. I just figured I would ask if anyone else out there has experience with a certain approach and has good documentation/tutorials to learn such an approach. Thanks in advance!

Checkout React Styleguidist by Clicking here

For many years I was enjoying working on my open source projects of all sizes: large like React Styleguidist or a tiny library that nobody else is using. However, the expectation that you owe someone free work to fix bugs in their projects and add features they need to do their job, the rude comments on the issues, the hit and run pull requests where you spend an hour reviewing the code and the author never comes back to answer your comments, made it less and less enjoyable, and my attempts to pretend that it doesn’t hurt my mental health became less and less successful.

This is yet another tool that offers an interactive way of creating and sharing UI components. And there’s no better representation of how React Styleguidist works than this GIF. On the right window, you have the code. The left window is where that code is concurrently rendered into a UI. And if required, you can also test and directly edit the code on the rendered side.

You can play with these examples along with my other components in this library directly within the documentation, which was generated using React Styleguidist.

So far, it seems that Storybook with it's interactive props and canvas playground is the most popular solution. Simplified versions, like Styleguidist or Docz do not provide enough props and canvas playground functionality to see them as alternatives. I would consider these two only valid documentation alternatives, but not for active development like Storybook.

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.