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Styling — is one of the elements in the front-end triada that every web developer must know: HTML/CSS/JS 🤔. On the other hand, there is a large group of web developers who don't like CSS. They prefer to use some helpers and libraries and basically try very hard to avoid writing this mysterious styling language. And we shouldn't judge these people, especially when it's related to React, because it's the essence of JSX.

Anyway, this post is for: lovers ❤️ and haters 😠. We will review 3 ways to turn the process of styling react components into a pleasant journey. You can choose the styling options that give you more or less control over your use case.

1. Use CSS modules to fully control the style of React components

Yes, you can completely ignore these libraries and use directly CSS/SCSS/SASSas if we don't have any JSX. This feature react-scripts@2.0.0is available starting from . Basically, everything can be used as you wish. [name].module.cssCreate a stylesheet using the following syntax .

Text.module.css

.success {
  background-color: green;
}

And simply import the component

import React from 'react';
import styles from './Text.module.css'; // 将 css 模块样式表作为样式导入
 
const Text = () => {
   return <div className={styles['success']}>Successful message</div>;
}

style['class-name']This format is preferred style.classNameover to keep our class names close to standard kebab case instead of ugly camel case.

It will automatically scope the styles for us using [filename]_[classname]_[hash]the format, and the end result will look like this in the browser:

<div class="Text_success_sdfg43l">Successful message</div>

We can also use preprocessor stylesheets like SCSS and SASS, just install npm install scssor npm install sass.

This approach gives us complete freedom in how we use CSS and eliminates the need to learn new syntax or libraries.

2. Use Chakra UI styling without CSS

These are my top 2 options, perfect for side projects and small to medium web applications. This year, tailwind has become very popular, and many web developers have found it to be the perfect solution for styling components without writing a single line of CSS. Its downside is that we need to look up the library a lot in the beginning until we get used to it. Another problem is that there will be a bunch of classes inside the component, which will bloat your React component and force you to duplicate the classes.

Chakra UI is similar to this, but in addition to styles, we also get UI components. It has everything you need to build any complex layout. It is also flexible enough if you need more sophisticated customization. The difference with tailwind is that in Charka UI, we will mainly pass styles through props instead of writing a list of classes, and it looks more natural for React applications to use props.

First, we need to install the dependencies:

$ npm i @chakra-ui/react @emotion/react @emotion/styled framer-motion

Set the provider to the root of your application:

function App() {
    return (<ChakraProvider>
                <TheRestOfYourApplication />
            </ChakraProvider>)
}

Now you can start:

<Text fontSize='6xl'>Your 6xl size text</Text>

If you don't need subtle styling and want to prototype your app quickly, this solution can quickly meet your needs. I like to use it in most of my projects.

3. The King of React Styles — styled-components

Not my favorite, but one of the most popular React styling libraries is Styled Components. It is used by many well-known companies. The reason I don't like it is that you need to create a new component every time you want to apply some simple styles. Maybe this makes sense in the normal world, we need to add a class, but here we will have a separate component. If you want to build your own UI component library, this can be a good solution. styled-componentsA cool feature of is that you can set style conditions through props, and it is customizable.

Start by installing the dependencies:

$ npm install --save styled-components

Now we are ready to create our first styled-component:

const Container = styled.div`
  text-align: center;
`

We can then use it as a component:

<Container>Your text</Container>