twindy

CSS Framework written in Stylus inspired by Tailwind and NIB

For websites and web apps there is no way around CSS. It is versatile and powerful, but in some places it is also cumbersome. CSS frameworks make things easier, but sometimes they are already too much. Then there are also utility first CSS frameworks like Tailwind, which put the whole design back into HTML.

Tailwind indeed offers maximum flexibility with attractive results. But it ignores the semantic structure of HTML. Especially if different themes are to be used, the classic approach to separate content and visual design is better.

To get the best of both worlds, I have written Stylus mix ins inspired by Tailwind using the incredibly powerful yet elegant Stylus CSS preprocessor, which should make the code clearer.

Get started

First twindy can be easily installed via npm:

npm i twindy

We now create a stylus file, e.g. 'mystormy.styl' with the content:

@require "twindy"

// Add your windy CSS styles here :)

Now the own file can be translated with Stylus:

npx stylus -w ./mystormy.styl -o ./mystormy.css -I ./node_modules

But also with Webpack etc. it should be possible to integrate twindy similarly.

Units

twindy introduces the special unit rex (a mix of rem and px). 1rem is usually equivalent to 16px, but it can vary between different environments. Still it is easier for most developers think in px. To get the best of both worlds and a UI that scales correctly for the environment you can now use rex(value) to have the pseudo pixel size being translated to rem values.

The shortcuts for padding and margin automatically convert pure numbers without any specified unit to rex. Such that in the following example we would get horizontal margins if 0.5rem:

.demo
  m-x 8

It should always be thought in steps of 8 to get a harmonious picture. Further, shortcuts like p() or m-y() or p-r() or the long versions like padding-y are available.

In case you would like to write your own function using rex with multiple values, there is a function for that:

fancy-border()
  border rexArgs(arguments)

.test
  fancy-border 1 solid -gray-500

// Will result in:
// border: 0.0625rem solid #71717a;

Predefined Values and Colors

Predefined values are prefixed by -. This convention should help to better see the difference of a mix in and a value.

Such values are e.g. colors. These have been adopted from Tailwind and can be used beautifully as follows:

.success
  color -green-900
  background -green-100

You can see the full list of colors at Tailwind.

Breakpoints / Responsiveness

Stylus already offers a flexible '@media' support, so it can also be placed within a class or mix in. The breakpoints are defined as variables. Example:

container()
  m-x(32)

  @media -lg
    margin-left auto
    margin-right auto
    max-width 960px

The full list is:

-sm = '(min-width: 640px)'
-md = '(min-width: 768px)'
-lg = '(min-width: 1024px)'
-xl = '(min-width: 1280px)'

Dark Mode

If the design should respond to systems that prefer dark mode, you can simply to so by defining the alternatives with @media -dark:

body
  color -gray-900
  @media -dark
    color white
    background -gray-800

But you could also set a class named dark to the html element programmatically and respond to that:

body
  color -gray-900
  .dark &
    color white
    background -gray-800

Learn more about this setup at Tailwind.

Reset

The included reset canonizes all elements so that they are used purely semantically and can be visually overloaded later. The box model is predefined with 'box-sizing: border-box'. In the own CSS definition you should then only set the desired font.

However, twindy generally does not add styles on its own, so we have to call the following mix in at the beginning of the CSS file:

tw-reset()

Prose

Similar to the reset, there are also predefined styles for continuous text passages, which can be used optionally. For example, for elements within the .prose class:

.prose
  tw-prose()

Shortcuts

To make the code look more like CSS you can use the tw expander for functionalities, that have none or default arguments (aliases use, do, apply or twindy). The previous example could be written this way too:

article
  tw prose

But it is also possible to add multiple calls like shown in the following sections.

Stack Layout

A strong abstraction for the layout, especially for web apps, is provided by stacks. A container can define a vertical stack-y() or horizontal stack-x(). The child elements are then arranged accordingly. If an element should consume the remaining space it can be marked with grow(). If it should be vertically scrollable, this can be done with vscroll(). If contained content should be placed vertically and horizontally centered, this can be defined with center(). In general, the layout is created using a flex box, so all the usual CSS properties will work.

Example:

.app
  use stack-x

  .sidebar
    use stack-y

  .content
    use stack-item-grow stack-item-scroll

Blocks

You can of course name and set your CSS selectors as you like, but I personally would not recommend going nuts by naming elements the BEM way or nest to hard. If you avoid global definitions for repeating elements like 'h1' or classes with common names like '.title' you can do everything you need in the scope of a well-defined block, without having side effects. This article from Cube CSS describes the methodology quite well.

Positioning

But also from the old stylus framework nib I took some things over, like the shortcuts for positioning elements:

.header
  absolute top left
  width 100%

File Size

Due to its design twindy is already very economical with definitions. But there is of course more to it:

1. use Purge CSS to remove unused styles
2. apply a CSS minifier, such as clean-css

Inspiring 3rd Party Work

• The elegant and powerful Stylus
• The awesome TailwindCSS
• The classic Stylus CSS framework nib