Discover Twin, a library that empowers developers to build better apps by blending the powers of Tailwind CSS along with CSS-in-JS.

Twin is a library that empowers developers to build better apps by blending the powers of Tailwind CSS along with CSS-in-JS. This article examines Twin to understand how it works and provides a tutorial for using it in a React app.

What is Tailwind CSS?

If you’re not familiar with it already, Tailwind is a utility-based CSS library used for creating custom designs. Tailwind inherits most of its characteristics from Atomic CSS, an approach to element styling that offers single-purpose class names.

Tailwind differs from its alternatives like Bootstrap and Bulma in that it provides only the raw essentials needed for styling pages and components, as opposed to a default theme with predefined components.

For example, to style a card with Bulma’s default theme, simply add class = 'card' to an element like a div. Tailwind, on the other hand, requires you to be more specific in defining styles. Tailwind provides classes such as bg-white to give an element a white background color, or px-4 for a padding of four on the x-axis.

As a result, a card designed using Tailwind’s utility classes will be similar to the following:

<div class="max-w-xs rounded overflow-hidden shadow-lg my-2">
  <div class="px-6 py-4">
    <div class="font-bold text-xl mb-2">The Coldest Sunset</div>
    <p class="text-grey-darker text-base">
      Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Voluptatibus quia, nulla! Maiores et perferendis eaque, exercitationem praesentium nihil.
    </p>
  </div>
</div>

What is CSS-in-JS?

CSS-in-JS is a pattern for writing component-scoped CSS using JavaScript. It’s important to note that CSS-in-JS is not a framework, but rather an authoring tool that allows you to implement different libraries.

#twin #tailwind #css #javascript #tailwindcss