windicss VS twin.macro

why not use Windi CSS or Tailwind css?

Windi CSS, in contrast to Tachyons, is a very fresh framework. Started in the late December of 2020, it’s already gained a lot of attention and currently sits at respectable 1.5K GitHub stars.

No mention of Windi CSS? Didn't it inspire this?

However I decided it was time to question my own biases. I installed Tailwind Intellisense for VS Code and started up a test project with a starter that included Tailwind (actually it uses Windi, which is a Tailwind compiler). I then started making a basic site, forcing myself to use the utility classes for (most) all of the styling.

For more details, please check windicss

You can check the README of windicss (https://github.com/voorjaar/windicss). Compared with postcss, it runs faster, can be built in real time and does not require plugins such as autoprefixer and purgecss to increase the complexity of configuration. And windicss extends the utilities and variants of tailwindcss. For example, you can directly use p-1.3rem or bg-hex-fff just like atomic css. And we also have a compilation mode, which can combine a line of classes into one to increase the readability of html.

Twin Macro Github Repo. This is a great resource to help you pick up Twin’s syntax, learn more about the package, and keep up to date with the latest releases.

Personally I like twin.macro the most. It’s similar to the above but based on Tailwind.

twin.macro is a library that allows you to use these styles in your JavaScript code. This library works exactly like styled-components.

One of the more promising alternatives is twin.macro - a Babel macro that processes Tailwind classes to generate JS objects understandable by various CSS-in-JS libraries. The developer experience (DX) of using it is amazing as you not only get all of Tailwind’s features without much change to your code, but you also get much more flexibility - all that on top of the traditional benefits of CSS-in-JS. Here’s an example code:

twin.macro

If you use Tailwind with React a lot, and are wanting support for Styled Components, give Twin Macro a look. They're close to finishing support for TW v3 in their Releases section :)

The blocker for us using it is our use of an excellent library called twin.macro which is built against babel's transpilation APIs to parse tailwindcss directives at compile time so that they may be used with css-in-js libraries. This efficiently bundles your css so that you only ship the precise css you use. The problem is, it's all quite slow.