Zenstyles Alternatives

zenstyles reviews and mentions

• Show HN: Atlassian Design for Bootstrap v5
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Oct 2023

  Last I checked, Bourbon was a bit too low-level for what I wanted. It didn't have implement any type of design system but just gave some basic utilities for those that wanted to build one.

  What I want is more-or-less what I started doing on https://gitlab.com/mushroomlabs/zenstyles. I took some of the code from materialize.css and stripped it from anything that depended on javascript and anything that required a specific layout definition. Basically, I wanted something that could work as a "classless CSS" that used the basic building blocks from materialize.css, so that I could use with code that was based on headless-ui components.

  This approach let me, e.g, use my hub20 checkout component (vue.js) without any styling on its own and let people integrate whatever "theme" they wanted. I only got to implement 2 "zen styles" following this approach (the other is on https://github.com/mushroomlabs/hub20.frontend.app/tree/mast..., and one day I will get to extract it out and move it to the "zen styles" repo) but it was enough to prove to me that this approach was not only possible but made my work a lot easier.

• Puppertino: A CSS framework based on Human Guidelines from Apple
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Aug 2022

  - Don't use CSS.

  All I'd want from a "framework" is to give a consistent set of SASS mixins, and I want to have one single sass file that generates all the CSS I need in one single place. It's not just for the purism of "separation of design and content", but also to make changes easier across a whole site.

  I started doing something like that with https://gitlab.com/mushroomlabs/zenstyles, but only out of necessity for my work on Hub20, I still think that if more designers started taking this approach, there could be a substantial increase in the quality of the "theme templates" offerings. Pair it with something like https://headlessui.dev and application developers could take a basic spreadsheet to focus on functionality at first, and then you easily switch between whatever "sass theme" you wanted without having to touch any of the code.