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Comment by awestroke | Hacker News Reader

Since I learned to write semantic class names, and to compose using scss or react components, Tailwind feels like it would be a big step back. I get that it would be kind of nice to prototype in, but is anybody here using it for complex apps or UIs?

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It's been discussed to death in the past.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22422873

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28004515

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18084013

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26422286

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25332101

From reading the previous threads, large projects are where it (apparently) really shines. Personally I didn't find it useful at all, but obviously YMMV.

I work on a large Next.js project that has at least 100 custom made components all using Tailwind CSS. It is, without a doubt, the best way to iterate and make changes. I will never go back to manual stylesheets. Having a separate CSS stylesheet feels like context switching and breaks the flow of development in my opinion.

Super bizarre - I've found the opposite. I really like Tailwinds, it's great for getting up and running quickly if you're a one-person-team but as our team's grown, readability becomes quite a big issue (it's just not as clear as pure CSS/SCSS I find)

It feels strange at first but then it's a bit like flying.

Netflix.

Also, you can prototype your stuff and then use the "extract" functionality to create components with nice shiny class names.

If you're using components, then it works great. The css is local to each component, and you only have to make changes in a single place. I'm just doing a fairly simple app, but I can see it scaling well to larger projects.

Where's the benefit over something like deduped CSS/Sass modules?

Funnily, I've experienced something of the same, but inverted. I was all in on semantic class names for years, then moved over to Tailwind for a few work projects and couple of years.

Now I'm back working on a project with a team that is staunchly against TW and I'm having a hell of time getting back into the rhythm of naming things. Everything just kinda looks like a box so I'm having to go back to the the designer or team to pull out names for things.

Definitely looking forward to when I can go back to using Tailwind at work and on personal stuff. The cognitive overhead is real.

On the contrary, semantic classnames feel like an enormous drag to me.

Components are a better way to segment semantic pieces of layout. Styling is lower level and having to name each atom of it is an enormous PITA.

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