vanilla-extract VS stitches

In our experience, the best testing strategy for modern frontends is a combination of E2E testing (using Playwright+NextJS), and unit testing. Visual regression testing is not worth the effort in our opinion, especially with the advent of better CSS tooling like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract.

For building component libraries I’ve been a big fan of vanilla extract. Apparently it’s from the same people who made css modules

This sounds exactly like Vanilla Extract. https://vanilla-extract.style/

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

The components are styled with CSS modules. When building the library, these styles will get transformed to normal CSS style sheets. This means that the consuming application will not even be required to support CSS modules. (In the future I want to extend this tutorial to use vanilla-extract instead.)

I do a lot of UI work and have never understood the appeal of Tailwind. It’s like relearning a new language. Tailwind was released in 2017. Maybe the CSS landscape wasn’t as good back then? Modern CSS is pretty awesome.

I’ve enjoyed using Vanilla Extract https://vanilla-extract.style/. It’s like css-in-js with none of the downsides as everything gets compiled to css.

Nah, I used enough Tailwind to know it becomes a spaghetti mess. I stick with CSS now, and in React I use https://vanilla-extract.style, compile time CSS in TypeScript.

Vanilla Extract is my current choice for the next greenfield project. I would also recommend checking out how and why this team integrated it with Tailwind.

I'm not trying to call a particular org or library out, because I think the ones I've been digging through (and prompted me to write this) are very high quality. It's vanilla-extract (a build-time CSS-in-JS library) and Braid Design System (built on vanilla-extract).

Apart from what has been suggested, there is also https://vanilla-extract.style/.

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.

Radix has some great ideas that challenge the way components are usually built. I'd love to use it, but am somewhat burned by how Stitches stopped being maintained due to the changes in React 18. Context: https://github.com/stitchesjs/stitches/discussions/1149#disc...

To be clear, it's not so much that they decided to not spend time, energy and money into maintaining it, but that there's seemingly been very little (if any) interest in letting others maintain it despite several people expressing interest. I'm sure it's scare handing over commit access, but if you're giving it up anyway then why not just do it, see what happens? Instead it's just dead in the water.

I'd happily pay license fees to use Radix and/or Stitches, if that guarantees maintenance. Sadly that's not an option it seems.

I work on a lot of more "creative" projects where frameworks like TailwindCSS or Bootstrap just don't cut it. My approach has always been to use some kind of library to ease the process of creating my own CSS framework that can then be used by other people. I find that Stitches does it pretty well. You set your design tokens, then you have IntelliSense to help people understand the design system.

Some libraries, such as Stitches, claim near-zero runtime performance overhead by tackling the first issue (parsing JavaScript CSS objects). Nevertheless, they still inject the parsed CSS into the DOM at runtime, which means they haven’t entirely eliminated the performance concerns.

Stitches allows you to map your design system

Define strict system of colors, spaces, etc then attempt to synchronize usage of it in both design and code (tools like https://vanilla-extract.style/ or https://stitches.dev/ can help with enforcing system on software side)

Curious to understand what is trending. We've been big fans of Stitches, however, unfortunately the project is no longer maintained.

There are some issues with SSR and NextJS in React 18: https://github.com/stitchesjs/stitches/issues/863

According to the docs, NextUI is a React UI library that allows you to make beautiful, modern, and fast websites/applications regardless of your design experience. It is created with React and Stitches, based on React Aria, and inspired by Vuesax.

Stitches CSS customization