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Shadcn/ui

Choosing the right component library is crucial for building scalable, maintainable, and accessible applications. After evaluating several options, we selected shadcn/ui as our primary UI component library. This decision was based on multiple factors, including developer experience (DX), accessibility, design flexibility, AI-assisted development, and distribution efficiency. Let's go over the key benefits

Key Benefits

👩‍💻 Developer Experience (DX)

shadcn/ui enhances developer productivity with:

  • Unopinionated, customizable components: Unlike traditional UI libraries that enforce a strict design system, shadcn/ui provides flexible components that can be easily tailored.
  • Built with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS: Ensuring strong typing, better maintainability, and seamless integration with modern styling methodologies.
  • No external runtime dependencies: Components are shipped as code, meaning no additional runtime libraries are required, reducing bundle size and performance overhead.

🧑‍🦯 Accessibility (a11y)

Accessibility is a core principle of shadcn/ui, with features such as:

  • Keyboard and screen reader support: Ensuring compliance with WCAG standards out-of-the-box.
  • ARIA attributes and best practices: Built-in support for accessible interactions without requiring additional configuration.
  • Customizability without compromising accessibility: Unlike some rigid libraries, shadcn/ui allows developers to modify components while maintaining accessibility best practices.

🤖 AI-Assisted Development

shadcn/ui’s architecture is AI-friendly, making it easier for AI-powered tools to assist with development by:

  • Clear, structured component architecture: Simplifies automated code generation and modifications.
  • Seamless integration with AI-driven coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT): Ensuring developers can efficiently generate, refactor, and debug components.
  • Minimal abstraction layers: Allowing AI models to better understand and suggest improvements for UI logic and styling.

🎨 Design and Customization

shadcn/ui offers unparalleled flexibility for design teams by:

  • Not enforcing a predefined theme: Making it adaptable to various design systems.
  • Easy token-based styling: Enabling rapid customization without losing maintainability.
  • Supports dark mode and theming: With built-in Tailwind utilities that simplify UI adjustments.

🚀 Efficient Distribution and Maintainability

Unlike monolithic UI frameworks, shadcn/ui optimizes distribution through:

  • Components as code: Avoiding package dependency bloat.
  • Version-independent updates: Since components are integrated into the codebase directly, updates don’t require dependency management headaches.
  • Better long-term maintainability: Teams can evolve components without relying on third-party release cycles.

shadcn/ui provides the right balance of flexibility, accessibility, developer experience, and maintainability. Its component-as-code philosophy ensures that we have complete control over our UI, leading to a more efficient, scalable, and accessible development workflow. By adopting shadcn/ui, we empower our team to build high-quality, customizable interfaces without the overhead of rigid UI frameworks.

What is Tailwind CSS?

Tailwind CSS is a tiny, utility first↗ CSS framework for building custom designs, without the context switching that regular CSS requires. It is purely a CSS framework and does not provide any pre-built components or logic, and provides a very different set of benefits↗ compared to a component library like Material UI.

It makes CSS incredibly easy and quick to write, as shown by the following example:

Old CSS:

  1. Write CSS, often in a separate file
.my-class {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;
  background-color: #fff;
  border: 1px solid #e2e8f0;
  border-radius: 0.25rem;
  padding: 1rem;
}
  1. Import CSS into your component
import "./my-class.css";
  1. Add the class to your HTML
<div class="my-class">...</div>

Equivalent in Tailwind:

  1. Just write classes in your HTML
<div
  class="flex flex-col items-center justify-center rounded border border-gray-200 bg-white p-4"
>
  ...
</div>

When used together with React Components, it is extremely powerful for quickly building UIs.

Tailwind CSS has a beautiful built-in design system, that comes out of the box with a carefully chosen color palette, sizing patterns for styles such as width/height and padding/margin for a uniform design, as well as media breakpoints for creating responsive layouts. This design system can be customized and extended to create the exact toolbox of styles that your project needs.

Usage

Make sure you have editor plugins for Tailwind installed to improve your experience writing Tailwind.

Extensions and Plugins

Formatting

Tailwind CSS classes can easily get a bit messy, so a formatter for the classes is a must have. Tailwind CSS Prettier Plugin↗ sorts the classes in the recommended order↗ so that the classes match the outputted css bundle. When selecting Tailwind in the CLI, we will install and configure this for you.

Conditionally Applying Classes

Conditionally adding classes using ternaries can get very messy and hard to read. These packages help in organizing your classes when using some conditional logic.

Resources