styled-components VS styled-jsx

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:

You'd rather use this over tailwind? Na...

styled-jsx -> A library with a lot of similar features like styled-components. Has some extra features here and there.

This isn't a new idea. CSS in JS is obviously a thing, but that usually implies having component code with CSS right alongside it in some sort of JS based syntax. There's also JSS which is a library for writing CSS with JS.

The CSS we'll use for the Gantt chart is included in the starter code. We've used Styled JSX, which comes with Next.js, to write scoped-styled components. There are some global styles in styles/globals.js. These global styles are added to our app in the Layout component in the components folder. The entire app is wrapped in this Layout component in the _app.js file, which is in the pages folder.

Styled JSX is what we're using at work right now, since we're using Next.js and it comes with this out of the box. We're actually using both SCSS modules for static styles and Styled JSX for dynamic styles. It's been great so far.

// schema.json { "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/schema", "cli": "nx", "$id": "ReactLibrary", "title": "", "type": "object", "properties": { "name": { "type": "string", "description": "Library name", "$default": { "$source": "argv", "index": 0 }, "x-prompt": "What name would you like to use for the library?", "pattern": "^[a-zA-Z].*$" }, "directory": { "type": "string", "description": "A directory where the lib is placed.", "alias": "dir" }, "domain": { "description": "Domain where this library belongs.", "type": "string", "default": "none", "alias": "dom", "x-prompt": { "message": "Which domain this library belongs?", "type": "list", "items": [ { "value": "web", "label": "Web" }, { "value": "common", "label": "Common" } ] } }, "scope": { "type": "string", "description": "A scope for the lib.", "alias": "sc" }, "type": { "description": "Library type", "type": "string", "alias": "t", "x-prompt": { "message": "Select library type?", "type": "list", "items": [ { "value": "data", "label": "Data" }, { "value": "model", "label": "Model" }, { "value": "util", "label": "Util" }, { "value": "feature", "label": "Feature" }, { "value": "ui", "label": "Ui" } ] } }, "style": { "description": "The file extension to be used for style files.", "type": "string", "default": "none", "alias": "s", "x-prompt": { "message": "Which stylesheet format would you like to use?", "type": "list", "items": [ { "value": "css", "label": "CSS" }, { "value": "scss", "label": "SASS(.scss) [ http://sass-lang.com ]" }, { "value": "styl", "label": "Stylus(.styl) [ http://stylus-lang.com ]" }, { "value": "less", "label": "LESS [ http://lesscss.org ]" }, { "value": "styled-components", "label": "styled-components [ https://styled-components.com ]" }, { "value": "@emotion/styled", "label": "emotion [ https://emotion.sh ]" }, { "value": "styled-jsx", "label": "styled-jsx [ https://www.npmjs.com/package/styled-jsx ]" }, { "value": "none", "label": "None" } ] } }, "linter": { "description": "The tool to use for running lint checks.", "type": "string", "enum": ["eslint", "tslint"], "default": "eslint" }, "unitTestRunner": { "type": "string", "enum": ["jest", "none"], "description": "Test runner to use for unit tests.", "default": "jest" }, "skipFormat": { "description": "Skip formatting files.", "type": "boolean", "default": false }, "skipTsConfig": { "type": "boolean", "default": false, "description": "Do not update `tsconfig.json` for development experience." }, "pascalCaseFiles": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Use pascal case component file name (e.g. `App.tsx`).", "alias": "P", "default": false }, "routing": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Generate library with routes." }, "appProject": { "type": "string", "description": "The application project to add the library route to.", "alias": "a" }, "publishable": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Create a publishable library." }, "buildable": { "type": "boolean", "default": false, "description": "Generate a buildable library." }, "importPath": { "type": "string", "description": "The library name used to import it, like `@myorg/my-awesome-lib`." }, "component": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Generate a default component.", "default": true }, "js": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Generate JavaScript files rather than TypeScript files.", "default": false }, "globalCss": { "type": "boolean", "description": "When `true`, the stylesheet is generated using global CSS instead of CSS modules (e.g. file is `*.css` rather than `*.module.css`).", "default": false }, "strict": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Whether to enable tsconfig strict mode or not.", "default": true }, "setParserOptionsProject": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Whether or not to configure the ESLint `parserOptions.project` option. We do not do this by default for lint performance reasons.", "default": false }, "standaloneConfig": { "description": "Split the project configuration into `/project.json` rather than including it inside `workspace.json`.", "type": "boolean" }, "compiler": { "type": "string", "enum": ["babel", "swc"], "default": "swc", "description": "Which compiler to use." } }, "required": ["name", "type", "scope", "domain"] }

The previous three methods covered the best styling options if you prefer Utility CSS. But perhaps you are more of a CSS-in-JS kind of person. In which case, Styled-JSX might be up your alley.