No, I am not using Tailwind. I really hate it.
derheap
AstonJ
Why do you hate it? Please give us more info so we can determine whether it’s something that might be worth taking into account ourselves..
1
mindreader
I’m using tailwind and now Daisy because phoenix recommended it. I have been around a long time and I remember how bad it was in the old days. We would have just huge gobs of CSS no one could remove but no one knew what it did so each new component just added to the pile because we couldn’t risk breaking the old stuff.
I’ve been a backend dev since then, so I’m not on top of it at all, but coming from that what tailwind does is a breath of fresh air. For a small app a little CSS is fine but it never goes away, and that requires something like the code analysis that tailwind does.
Not to mention I set up this app, wrote some pretty complicated pages and with Daisy everything looks decent. It even helps lower the amount of classes you send over the wire. And ai really kills it with a little tailwind v4 context.
I get that the up front is a bit annoying but going back to the basics is not for me. I’ve been there.
4
manhtranlinh
Could we use both TailwindCSS and custom css? I tried with some suggestions from some AI to avoid TailwindCSS to reset custom CSS but the custom still work not smoothly.
2
karolsluszniak
Wow quite a thread so I’ll make it short. I’ve neglected Tailwind for years, preferring manual CSS/SASS. Tailwind 4 changed my mind and I’m never going back, unless forced by existing project’s stack. It’s compact, well-documented, with mature ecosystem around it.
I’ve never been styling so fast and so beautiful & consistent before. Not even close.
5
greven
For small projects, to be honest, it doesn’t matter, go with whatever if you are working alone.
If you don’t know CSS well, I would advise to just go vanilla and learn some CSS, it is through pain that we learn and grow. I have in my career maintained large projects from big companies where CSS was a major big pain, specially in legacy systems.
I like Tailwind CSS but I know CSS very well, if I had to choose, I would choose co-located Scoped CSS, like VueJS does over Tailwind, but since that isn’t a choice in every framework, for example LiveView, I do prefer TailwindCSS over un-scoped CSS class soup hell.
Every big project starts small and with very good intentions, but maintaining CSS is HARD, this is what TailwindCSS does better, at least, at the lack of scoped CSS / CSS Modules.
Also, utility CSS makes a lot of sense, specially for layouts, there is always a lot of repeating classes, no one needs different named classes for single utilities, but it has been done before, for example, Bootstrap, it had utilities built-in.
This approach to CSS is probably my favourite: https://cube.fyi/
5
karolsluszniak
Interesting, before switching to Tailwind I’ve worked on React frontend with styled-components which were, according to our FEs, as good as it gets wrt modern, scoped, well organized CSS. And while I saw the good parts, the neat way to inject props etc) there were clear cons too - need to import everything including spacings, risk of infinite-permutation props etc.
It way probably that point which made me feel „enough is enough” after 10+ years of writing CSS.
So it happened that Tailwind 4 release just came in, with super-nice stuff like **:[sleector]:util to further reduce a need for ad hoc custom CSS, making TW a really complete & uniform option for me.
3
sreyansjain
hauleth
matt-savvy
I wonder if someone out there has a fork of the generators that is set up for plain CSS. I know you can use –no-tailwind when generating your project, but I’m thinking more of one that has a CSS file set up, added to the static path, core components generated but without tailwind styles, same with the other view/live view generators, and so on.
1