Streamlining Styling in React Projects with Tailwind

Timo H

Jupyter

Community Picks is a section on daily.dev where our community members share the most interesting and valuable content they've discovered online. From insightful articles to handy tools, every post is a gem curated by our dedicated coomunity. To contribute to Community Picks, you need to have at least 250 reputation points, ensuring that only active and trusted members can share their finds.

Community Picks

Tailwind CSS is a magic styling library that revolutionizes styling in React projects. It offers a utility-first approach, drastically reducing the amount of code needed and providing rapid development, consistency, and customization options. However, it may pose a learning curve, impact file size, and require careful overrides.

Tailwind CSS: The Magic Style Library

What, then, is this styling library (Tailwind CSS) about?

I don’t agree with disadvantages about file size because for me, always used tailwind styles are smaller than the different approach

One of the things that might be problematic is the fact that the HTML will seem larger to read than ever
The good part as well is that you won’t need to worry about “selectors”

I often notice that Tailwind is praised by people with only pure CSS in their background (at most in combination with SCSS), plus sometimes Bootstrap.
Having such experience, it seems logical to me that after trying Tailwind, people see it as the top of perfection. I’ve had the experience of developing a modern project with SASS and it’s really a pain.
But tell me how you could miss such things as CSS-in-JS, Styled-Components, Linaria, etc.? Your pain could have been solved a long time ago.
I’m very interested to hear from people who actively used Styled-Components and then became Tailwind adherents - what are your arguments, what is your workflow, do you debug styles in devtools?
My only argument is that Tailwind beats CSS-in-JS because it offers better performance due to its lack of runtime. But this is not important in all projects. Besides, there are new CSS-in-JS solutions with zero runtime.

interesting points! I was just thinking about this “Bootstrap vs. Tailwind” stuff and this article helped me taking some conclusions! appreciated 🙌🏻

I just start to learn front-end. I use Tailwind CSS without learning the traditional way.