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Tailwind always looks like a cool evolution of Tachyons [0] to me (with a build step). On the other hand, tachyons is really simple, you just drop it into your

by rgbrgb 5y ago

Tailwind always looks like a cool evolution of Tachyons [0] to me (with a build step). On the other hand, tachyons is really simple, you just drop it into your project with no build required (or drop the sass in), and I've never really felt like it was missing any features I wanted. Has anyone used both seriously who can compare? [0]: https://tachyons.io/ https://tachyons.io/

sebmellen 5y ago
Tailwind is more like an editorialized version of all the features available in "vanilla CSS" than it is a UI library. Tachyons is a small, tiny UI library that enforces (ugly) standard defaults. Also, the naming of classes in Tailwind feels much more natural — the tachyons naming is condensed to the point of being abstruse.
edmcnulty101 5y ago
Hey great question! I was wondering that as well! They're both considered 'functional CSS' libraries. I used Tachyons after spending 5 minutes trying to figure out the build process for Tailwind and Tachyons worked great for the single site I used it on.
sph 5y ago
I wanted to love tachyons before Tailwind was a thing. I jumped to Tailwind as soon as it released because it was configurable. The tachyons way of changing the defaults, such as colours or breakpoints, last I checked years ago, was using search/replace or forking the repo and adding your changes. Eh, no thanks. Tailwind is better in every way, and JIT is a killer feature.
- porker 5y ago
  > Tailwind is better in every way, and JIT is a killer feature. I dunno, the smaller dev build from JIT is great, but it breaks my in-browser design workflow. Only the CSS styles needed are generated, so I can't make in-browser tweaks to see what a different padding/margin/other-property looks like.
  - monkey_monkey 5y ago
    Tailwind 3.0 has a JIT/CDN thing that allows prototyping in the browser.
    - yurishimo 5y ago
      I don't know that this solves their problem though. Even with the in-browser JIT, there is no class for the browser to autocomplete. One nice benefit of the old compiler, was every single class was available with autocomplete in devtools. Granted, if you already know the class you want to tweak and can guess the next correct step in the scale, it's fine, but for new code you're writing for the first time, I can see their argument.
- rgbrgb 5y ago
  For customizing it, we copy the sass files and replace variables for colors and breakpoints. It's not what you usually do with a dependency, but Tachyons is feature complete and has very few (read: human patchable) updates. It's an easy way to have a custom style-guide in sass within a few tweaks. It's a pretty small and readable codebase, so while there's a downside that you can't upgrade it by incrementing a version, the upside is that you don't have an opaque upstream dependency and you can cut any fluff you don't need (though there isn't much).
gregsadetsky 5y ago
I've had the feeling that Tachyons is a bit abandoned, no? The album component/example [0] has been showing 404 images for a while. The last release on GitHub is from 2018. CSS frameworks don't ... need? to be state-of-the-art/updated all of the time (I get that), but at the same time, like anything else, once a component/css/etc. library falls behind, it (can) become harder to make it work with other tools. i.e. it's hard to abandon the bandwagon of constant new releases, as the second that you do, "stuff" sometimes starts breaking. This is of course a very general observation that doesn't apply to everything. [0] https://tachyons.io/components/collections/albums/index.html https://tachyons.io/components/collections/albums/index.html
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Tachyons has been stated to be feature complete by its authors many, many times.

by rgbrgb 5y ago

sebmellen 5y ago

Tailwind is more like an editorialized version of all the features available in "vanilla CSS" than it is a UI library. Tachyons is a small, tiny UI library that enforces (ugly) standard defaults. Also, the naming of classes in Tailwind feels much more natural — the tachyons naming is condensed to the point of being abstruse.

edmcnulty101 5y ago

Hey great question! I was wondering that as well! They're both considered 'functional CSS' libraries. I used Tachyons after spending 5 minutes trying to figure out the build process for Tailwind and Tachyons worked great for the single site I used it on.

sph 5y ago

I wanted to love tachyons before Tailwind was a thing. I jumped to Tailwind as soon as it released because it was configurable. The tachyons way of changing the defaults, such as colours or breakpoints, last I checked years ago, was using search/replace or forking the repo and adding your changes. Eh, no thanks. Tailwind is better in every way, and JIT is a killer feature.

porker 5y ago
> Tailwind is better in every way, and JIT is a killer feature. I dunno, the smaller dev build from JIT is great, but it breaks my in-browser design workflow. Only the CSS styles needed are generated, so I can't make in-browser tweaks to see what a different padding/margin/other-property looks like.
- monkey_monkey 5y ago
  Tailwind 3.0 has a JIT/CDN thing that allows prototyping in the browser.
  - yurishimo 5y ago
    I don't know that this solves their problem though. Even with the in-browser JIT, there is no class for the browser to autocomplete. One nice benefit of the old compiler, was every single class was available with autocomplete in devtools. Granted, if you already know the class you want to tweak and can guess the next correct step in the scale, it's fine, but for new code you're writing for the first time, I can see their argument.
rgbrgb 5y ago
For customizing it, we copy the sass files and replace variables for colors and breakpoints. It's not what you usually do with a dependency, but Tachyons is feature complete and has very few (read: human patchable) updates. It's an easy way to have a custom style-guide in sass within a few tweaks. It's a pretty small and readable codebase, so while there's a downside that you can't upgrade it by incrementing a version, the upside is that you don't have an opaque upstream dependency and you can cut any fluff you don't need (though there isn't much).

gregsadetsky 5y ago

I've had the feeling that Tachyons is a bit abandoned, no? The album component/example [0] has been showing 404 images for a while. The last release on GitHub is from 2018. CSS frameworks don't ... need? to be state-of-the-art/updated all of the time (I get that), but at the same time, like anything else, once a component/css/etc. library falls behind, it (can) become harder to make it work with other tools. i.e. it's hard to abandon the bandwagon of constant new releases, as the second that you do, "stuff" sometimes starts breaking. This is of course a very general observation that doesn't apply to everything. [0] https://tachyons.io/components/collections/albums/index.html https://tachyons.io/components/collections/albums/index.html

endisneigh 5y ago
Tachyons has been stated to be feature complete by its authors many, many times.