The larger your stylesheet, the harder it is to maintain clean and efficient CSS. When you start managing specificity and ensuring consistent rendering across browsers, what should be routine starts looking like rocket science. It’s like trying to write a novel on a single, messy notepad page, with different factions fighting over penmanship, and the final product looking slightly different depending on whether you read it with a highlighter or a magnifying glass.
Sounds terrible right?
When faced with managing large stylesheets, most devs today prioritize both performance and the developer experience, a shift that has seen a rise in CSS tools that offer greater efficiency and streamlined workflows.
However, efficiency is just one side of the coin, as devs still want the flexibility to exert fine-grained control over various aspects of styling. Hence, the ability to customize their workflow and integrate these tools with existing processes remains crucial.
In this article, we will look at some CSS tools that offer the perfect blend of efficiency and flexibility when handling CSS. These tools help devs create high-performing and maintainable websites, wrangle unruly stylesheets, optimize website performance, and empower you to conquer the modern web.
Without further ado, let’s dive right in!
While there are many CSS handling tools available today, we’ve picked the best tools you could use based on:
The first tool we’ll look at is Pigment CSS, a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS library built to extract the co-located styles into separate CSS files during the build phase and eliminate the need for runtime style processing.
It’s a simple yet efficient trick that gives you a faster, more performant user experience.
Pigment CSS was designed to be a successor to Emotion by offering a superior developer experience while maintaining compatibility with React Server Components, and with over 91k stars on GitHub, some say it’s well on its way to doing that. Pigment CSS’s zero-runtime approach comes at the cost of increased build time, but it’s a worthwhile trade-off for projects that prioritize runtime performance, especially for those with complex design systems.
color-mix() to unlock features like color transformations and theme variables necessary for maintaining sophisticated design systemsNext-Yak is a CSS-in-JS solution specifically designed to find a middle ground between speed and API complexity in Next.js projects. In this case, it combines the best of both worlds, offering the expressive power that styled-components is known for with the efficient build-time extraction of CSS championed by Next.js.
Next-Yak allows you to write clear and maintainable CSS code directly within your React components using the familiar syntax of styled-components, so it has a smooth learning curve. However, it doesn’t stop there. Next-Yak takes things a step further by using the built-in CSS handling capabilities of Next.js to extract styles from your components and generate separate CSS files.
This approach eliminates the need for runtime processing and results in faster applications.
When styled-components hit the CSS scene, it caught many developers’ eyes with its core concept: component-level styling. With this approach, your styles are defined directly within your React components using template literals and tagged functions. It’s a straightforward technique that keeps styles tightly coupled with their corresponding components, making your code easier to find, understand, and modify.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to create a Card component that changes color based on a type prop. With styled-components, you can create this easily, like so:
Learn more →import styled from 'styled-components';
const Card = styled.div`
background-color: ${(props) => props.type === 'primary' ? '#007bff' : (props.type === 'secondary' ? '#6c757d' : '#ffc107')};
/* Other styles... */
`;
function MyComponent() {
return (
<div>
<Card type="primary">Primary Card</Card>
<Card type="secondary">Secondary Card</Card>
</div>
);
}
This simple example shows how you can use styled-components to create dynamic and reusable styles for your React components cleanly and efficiently. styled-components shine the most when used in React, and, when compared to other popular solutions like SCSS, it’s considered a more elegant solution.
isActive prop, or a card that adjusts its layout based on the content it displays. This flexibility is crucial for building engaging and dynamic user interfacesThere are many other benefits that styled-components provides, and we cover them in more detail here.
WyW-in-JS, short for “Whatever-you-want-in-JS,” is a unique toolkit designed for building various zero-runtime CSS-in-JS libraries. WyW-in-JS puts developers in the driver’s seat by allowing them to choose the syntax and features they need for their CSS-in-JS solution, without being tied to a specific implementation.
WyW-in-JS is not a one-trick pony; in addition to its customizability, it also focuses on build-time extraction. During the build process, styles are extracted from your components and written into separate CSS files. As you can imagine, this route eliminates the need for runtime processing and improves performance for end-users.
Managing styles in large React applications can become a hassle as your codebase grows, but not if you use CSS Modules.
CSS Modules is not a tool, but rather a technique used to scope all class names and animation names locally by default. It lets you confine styles to the component where they are defined, preventing them from spilling over and affecting other parts of your application.
If you want to style a button component using CSS modules, here’s how you’d do it:
// Button.module.css
.button {
background-color: #4CAF50; /* Green */
color: white;
padding: 15px 32px;
text-align: center;
text-decoration: none;
display: inline-block;
font-size: 16px;
margin: 4px 2px;
cursor: pointer;
}
// Button.jsx
import styles from './Button.module.css';
function Button() {
return (
<button className={styles.button}>Click me</button>
);
}
This is just a simplified explanation, and if you’d like to know more about how CSS modules work under the hood, we dived deep into CSS Modules here. In summary, CSS Modules are excellent for managing CSS in projects where React developers aim to enhance maintainability and promote. component-based styling
Last but by no means least is Emotion, a tool that provides an efficient and flexible CSS handling solution tailored specifically for React applications.
Like other tools mentioned above, Emotion has a modular and component-scoped approach. But it still manages to stand out with its dynamic styling capabilities, focus on performance, and support for theming and design systems. Emotion is built for developers who want to create visually stunning and highly adaptive user interfaces while promoting maintainable and scalable codebases.
Often compared to styled-components, Emotion’s focus on co-location, dynamic behavior, performance, and developer experience makes it a popular choice for modern React development. However, it’s less complex than styled-components and there are still many key differences in its approach and features.
All these tools are great for more efficient and flexible CSS handling but they all have distinct features, trade-offs, and philosophies, making it crucial to evaluate them carefully against the specific needs of your project. Before you choose, first consider:
If you’re looking for a tool that lets you handle styles more efficiently and flexibly within your React projects, look no further than these tools. From the local scoping capabilities of CSS Modules to the dynamic, performant nature of CSS-in-JS solutions like Emotion and Next-Yak, these tools offer a significant shift in how you approach styling in React development.
Remember, the perfect CSS tool for your React project depends on your specific needs and preferences. Carefully consider project requirements, developer familiarity, and any additional factors before choosing a solution that’ll help you create beautiful, performant, and maintainable user interfaces.
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