Stylesmith

Stylesmith is a small zero-dependency library to use ES6 tagged template strings for component styling.

It's primary purpose is to be used alongside with React.js and Radium.

Inspired by React: CSS in JS and Radium's enhanced style objects (':hover', '@media' keys and similar).

Usage with React / Radium

import React, { Component } from 'react'
import style from 'stylesmith'
import { colors } from './my-theme'

/*
 * You can use any JS variable in the template string style.
 * Pass strings or numbers as style rule values.
 * Pass an object to merge its styles.
 */
const buttonStyle = style`
  background: ${colors.green}
  color: ${colors.white}
  margin: 10 20

  :hover {
    background: ${colors.blue}
  }

  @media print {
    display: none
  }
`

export default class Button extends Component {
  render () {
    return (
      <button style={buttonStyle}>{this.props.children}</button>
    )
  }
}

Installation

Using NPM:

npm install --save stylesmith

Using JSPM:

jspm install stylesmith

What happens here?

style`
  margin: 10
  color: ${color.white}

  :hover {
    text-decoration: underline
    ${anotherStyle}
  }
`

// returns this object:

{
  margin: 10,
  color: color.white,
  ':hover': Object.assign({
    'text-decoration': 'underline'
  }, anotherStyle)
}

Looks much friendlier, doesn't it? And no more CSS class name crazyness! The styles you define here are only applied to the elements you render with the style property set to it.

Why would I need that?

As vjeux points out in his popular talk React: CSS in JS, CSS styling comes with some built-in troubles. Some of them can pretty easy be come over by using a pre-processor like SASS or LESS (like variables).

But other problems persist and cannot easily be solved using stylesheets, such as the fact that CSS only knows one global scope. So you have to be very careful how to write your CSS selectors in order to not have them style things they are not supposed to and avoid naming clashes.

React's inline style objects provide a simple, yet powerful solution for the problem. Radium extends the concept by introducing nested ':hover', ':active', '@media', ... objects.

The only problem is now that these objects tend to look quite unpleasant. Using ES6 template strings you can now write them just as a block of CSS rules and insert ${variable} where you need to.

Proper styling, easy and powerful. And you do not even have to preprocess your styles anymore!

License

Licensed under the terms of the MIT license. See file LICENSE for details.