twind VS cssnano

I think TW syntax is great as a CSS shorthand. I think it can be a great tool for making highly descriptive styles in a far more succinct fashion. I think if you you use Twind compiler and you store TW syntax outside of your templates/JSX and you just compile it down to descriptive class names, that's a great use of Tailwind. Then you get the advantage of meaningful names applied to elements in the template, and if you need to refactor/fix a style, then you can find it much easier. It also makes it a lot more dynamic, which standard Tailwind which can be a PITA to make dynamic (e.g. for dynamic behavior in Twind, you can have functions that generate TW style strings and use interpolated strings without having to worry about if the build-time TW compiler understands all the possibilities).

But at least you like something. And I get why people like Tailwind, but I end up finding it constricting for behavior that results in dynamic styles. But I've tried Twind which is a runtime TW compiler and it fixes most of my complaints and it has the same SSR-ability like Stitches & Emotion.

The CSS-in-JS library solves problems of global nature of CSS and of specificity by providing scoping in a unique class-name. It has some cost attached to it i.e run-time which is being solved by order libs vanilla-extract-css. I'm a big fan of tailwind and I honestly believe it is enough for your project. If you also need dynamic styles then CSS-in-JS is better over tailwind, though there are solutions like twind which provide a flavor of tailwind with the CSS-in-JS approach they do have all cons of any CSS-in- JS libraries. I'm very excited about styles by Facebook and waiting for the day it will be open-sourced or CSS itself evolves to me provide scoping and be more modular, until that day comes I'm betting on CSS-in-JS with stitches and vanilla-extract-css.

what framwork are you coming from? i honestly wouldn’t try fresh unless you are using tailwind - bootstrap components are jsx based, and fresh is based off islands architecture which would make integrating the two trickier since youd have to route through deno + the preact compat lib. if you really want to do it, read into this. that being said, tailwind is a very powerful tool. i use it daily in nearly every element on front end, and as someone who likes avoiding design as much as possible ive found tailwind (and twind) are extremely pleasant to work with since it’s mostly class/keyword based styling as opposed to css / sass / scss styling

I want to do something similar with Remix to make a separate stylesheet per route with content coming from a CMS like WordPress. I’ve had my eye on Twind once they add compatibility with v3 and all the JIT stuff. https://twind.dev/

When initializing a new project, Fresh will also ask if you want to use Twind, which is a Tailwind-to-JS library. If you choose this option, then you will have the power of Tailwind without creating a config file or using PostCSS, which I thought is pretty cool.

Try https://twind.dev/

Use free tools like Terser for JavaScript and CSSNano for CSS:

Minify CSS: Strip out comments, whitespace, and redundant code with tools like CSSNano or CleanCSS. A 100KB stylesheet might shrink to 70KB, speeding up downloads.

cssnano has had some complicated ownership turnover[0], I'm glad to see someone took the mantle again though.

I do find that CSSO[1] with structural optimizations can be more effective still, perhaps that will be less true overtime though.

I think once lightning CSS is more stable (in particular, some bugs are addressed around ordering) it will be the clear winner in this space though.

[0]: https://github.com/cssnano/cssnano/issues/833

[1]: https://github.com/css/csso

cssnano/cssnano - A modular minifier, built on top of the PostCSS ecosystem.

There are a number of tools available to minify CSS in development or as part of your build pipeline including, but not limited to, cssnano and Vite. If you’re using sass, it’s as straightforward as adding --style=compressed to your sass command. The results you achieve may vary depending on the complexity of your CSS, but you may see numbers similar to this (processed with sass):

Since Tailwind is a PostCSS plugin, we can also add cssnano plugin to compress the bundle.

Minifying your CSS involves removing unnecessary whitespace, comments, and reducing property names. This results in smaller file sizes and faster downloads. Use tools like UglifyCSS and CSSNano for this purpose.

For the sake of simplicity, my example setup uses a single-file plugin and puts all styles directly into a single style.css file without using further theme.css or theme.json files, which we might want to use depending on the requirements for customizability. Likewise, SASS / SCSS support can be added if it makes life easier for the developer(s) involved. But as we already use PostCSS to control autoprefixing and cssnano minification, we can also use it to support the latest and even upcoming CSS sytax like native CSS nesting.

The cssnano plugin can minify/compress CSS and make it suitable for production use. Install cssnano plugin using this command: