Windi CSS and Tailwind JIT

Disclaimer: All the words are only representing my opinions. None of them applies to the Windi CSS’s author nor the team.

I spoke out for Windi CSS just because keeping silence on this also means we are encouraging such things to happen again in the open-source community.

Tailwind was once my favorite CSS framework and I was really happy to see we made it works on Vite much faster with @voorjaar’s astonishing Windi CSS compiler. But I was totally unexpected to see that end up being like this. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see Tailwind’s long pain get solved officially with Tailwind JIT and benefit the community. What I am saying is that Tailwind used/inspired by Windi’s idea without even mentioning Windi CSS once and claiming it’s their own ideas (until 20min after my tweets about that, they appended two tweets in the comments, mentioned about Windi but still implies it’s their idea. That’s all we got). No official reply of this whole thing, not updates to their repo’s README, at all.

I don’t want to speculate what’s the reasons or motivations behind it, all I know is that I will not use any products from Tailwind Labs anymore. If you think I was reacting too much or it was not a big deal, then I truly wish such things would never happend on you once again.

On the bright side, Windi pushed Tailwind to make the JIT and improved the DX and Tailwind forced Windi to be independent and evolving to not being a "Tailwind accessory" any longer.

There is another community based CSS-in-JS alternative called Twind, which you definitely want to check out (they are working closely with Windi to bring an uniformed community standard/spec of our DSL, cheers @sastan!).

As for myself, I will spend more time on working with Windi CSS to make it even better. Here is some of exciting things we are working on:

Thanks for reading though. Don’t feel any pressure about using any tools that you needed. I choose not to use them just because my personal preference. I don’t want to force anyone to switch their stack because reading this post, we will keep improve it and show you which is the better one you should use :)