windicss VS twind

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.

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/