styled-components VS linaria

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.

You can use Media Queries in Styled-Components similar to how you would use them in CSS, other than the fact that you can define custom screen sizes in your theme and access them inside your Media Queries:

The code duplication occurred due to disabling the default code splitting algorithm in Next.js. Previous developers used this approach to make Linaria work, which is designed to improve productivity. However, disabling code splitting led to a decrease in performance.

KumaUI : Another relatively new contender, Kuma uses zero runtime CSS-in-JS to create headless UI components which allows a lot of flexibility. It was heavily inspired by other zero runtime CSS-in-JS solutions such as PandaCSS, Vanilla Extract, and Linaria, as well as by Styled System, ChakraUI, and Native Base. ### Vue

I like Linaria [0] because your IDE typechecks your styles and gives you autocomplete/intellisense when typing styles. With Tailwind you have to look everything up in docs because it's all strings, not importable constants. Leads to a lot of bugs from typos that aren't a thing with type checked styles.

[0] https://github.com/callstack/linaria

And if you're wondering why I'm not using something like Linaria or some other runtime-less CSS-in-JS tool, it's simply because I don't want to have to spend my time setting things up and working around stuff and all that jazz. I just want something that works, and I've already got a personal scaffold for getting SC to work out of the box with Next, so, right now, it's either that or sticking to CSS/SCSS/SASS. For me, that is. I know it's such a small thing, but, honestly, one less headache for me is 2 steps forward.

I know that there are solutions that generate static css files (like vanilla-extract or linaria), but neither of them work with app router currently (1, 2).

If you really want tighter interaction with JS, try a zero-runtine solution like linaria

https://github.com/callstack/linaria is objectively the best. It's 100% styled component compatible, but with zero runtime which not only makes it substantially faster, but also makes it easy to do things like server side rendering, etc.

tags inside SFCs are typically injected as native </code> tags during development to support hot updates. <strong>For production they can be extracted and merged into a single CSS file.</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>There are also 3rd party CSS libs that do the same thing such as <a href="https://linaria.dev/">linaria</a>, <a href="https://vanilla-extract.style/">vanilla-extract</a>, and <a href="https://compiledcssinjs.com/">compiled CSS</a>. Which can be used in the event you're stuck with something that doesn't have baked in support via SFC formats (looking at you React).</p> <p>These are my preferred ways of handing it.</p> <ol> <li>Tailwind</li> </ol> <p>Option 2 is tailwind, which works backwards.</p> <p>That is, instead of the above with extraction where you write the styles, and the framework or libs extract them and replace them with class names, it's the other way around.</p> <p>You're writing class names first (which are essentially aggregated CSS property-values) which then generate and/or reference styles.</p> <p>It has the advantage of being easy to write (assuming you've got editor LSP, linting, etc), but as you've discovered, it's difficult to read / can get really messy really fast.</p> <p>As far as all the other claims on the Tailwind site, it's all marketing, at least 80% bullshit.</p> </div>