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Comment by lmiller1990 | Hacker News Reader

lmiller1990

This is how it basically was since day 1. These comments always appear in Tailwind threads -- more often than not, the poster hasn't given Tailwind a good try.

It's definitely worth building a few small projects - it looks and feels bad at first, but once you get used to using it, it's really hard to go back to anything else.

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I've built a few small projects with it, and as much as I love the design tokens the idea of having a CSS class for every value of every possible property feels like abusing CSS, and it makes it feel like it has the same complexity of css

that's how I felt until my first `dark:text-white`. I got 'dark mode' out of the box and only needed to change a few things. I didn't need to google how to set up the css, then define a whole new dark mode. I was able to do iteratively, right on the component I was changing. This made 'more work' on the dev side, but on the testing side, you just had to find a single instance of the component and verify it looked reasonable.

I think the ability to mix up things like that is what makes it quite powerful. You don't have to go digging through your sources to find all instances of '.my-one-off-class-that-some-random-dev-also-used'.

Yes. It is intended to be equally complex, short of inheritance. But keep in mind that it doesn’t actually ship every class, it trims them out.

It does feel radically different from the more traditional way of doing things, but I think it is for the better. I wouldn't call it abusing.

Tailwind together with view components has changed how I structure my code and it creates quite a bit less work than my company's old more BEM centric approach where we would create lots of tightly coupled CSS code controlled by variables and such. I find it easier to grok as well, because I don't need to reference SCSS files to determine the implications of applied classes when debugging or similar.

Now most of the component requirements can be codified in a few classes in our view component instead. Does it look kinda ugly, yeah sure. But I'm sure it has saved quite a few hours for me since I switched over.

This might just be because old process was even worse, regardless it has been a very positive change for me personally.

Agreed. I was a hater at first, but now I’ll never go back. Took me a couple months to get used to it. However i split my time between both frontend and backend.

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