Babel Plugin Style Literal

This is an experimental plugin that compiles tagged string literals to inline style objects that can be used in JSX components. No runtime needed.

Rationale

This is not a "CSS-in-JS" approach and is not supposed to be one. Even though I heavily use CSS, often I find inline styles useful when prototyping or making data visualization piece which styles are not just presentation aspects, but the content itself.

However, there is some friction present when you need to work with inline styles in JSX. It requires style to be written as an object, with keys camelCased. So when you have some CSS you can copy-paste, you need to do some work to make it look like an object. This is quite unproductive piece of work. And later, when you decide to move those inline styles to a CSS file, an opposite amount of work has to be done.

This plugin aims at removing that unnecessary friction and unlocking complete experience in writing CSS code no matter where you need it.

Usage

1. Install the plugin

npm install --save-dev babel-plugin-style-literal

2. Add the plugin to your Babel config

{
  "plugins": ["babel-plugin-style-literal"]
}

In your code, use css as a template tag whenever you need to compile a piece of CSS to object literal. You don't need to import the tag, the plugin will remove it in the build time.

Examples

In:

let textColor = getRandomColor();
let style = css`
  font-size: 12px;
  line-height: 1.5;
  color: ${textColor};
`;
let text = <p style={style}>Hello, World!</p>;

Out:

let textColor = getRandomColor();
let style = {
  fontSize: '12px',
  lineHeight: '1.5',
  color: textColor,
};
let text = <p style={style}>Hello, World!</p>;

License

MIT License.

The implementation is partially based on @blia's css-tag.