Seen this as a tailwind coder?

<button
  className={cn("px-4 py-2 rounded", {
    "bg-blue-500 text-white": isPrimary,
    "bg-gray-200 text-gray-800": !isPrimary,
  })}
>
  Click me
</button>

Have you ever wondered why everyone is using the cn function?

That's what we'll dive into today.

There are two problems cn solves:

Class conflicts
Conditional classes

Class conflicts

Let's say we have a button component with bg-blue-500 and text-white classes.

export function Button({ className }) {
  return (
    <button className={`px-4 py-2 rounded bg-blue-500 text-white ${className}`}>
      Click me
    </button>
  );
}

Now, let's use this button in a component. However, we wanna override the background color to bg-red-500.

<Button className="bg-red-500">Click me</Button>

The problem with tailwind is that overriding classes is not as simple as adding a new class. The outcome is unpredictable. Whether we put the className prop of the button at the beginning or the end, we don't know what Tailwind will prioritize.

Hence we use twMerge from tailwind-merge to deal with this.

import { twMerge } from "tailwind-merge";

export function Button({ className }) {
  return (
    <button
      className={twMerge(`px-4 py-2 rounded bg-blue-500 text-white`, className)}
    >
      Click me
    </button>
  );
}

Huh! That works.

className will be passed and work as expected.

Conditional classes

We have another problem. What if we want to conditionally apply classes?

We could still use twMerge for this. But it would become a bit messy.

export function Button({ isPrimary }) {
  return (
    <button
      className={twMerge(
        `px-4 py-2 rounded`,
        isPrimary ? `bg-blue-500 text-white` : `bg-gray-200 text-gray-800`
      )}
    >
      Click me
    </button>
  );
}

You can imagine if we had multiple conditional classes, it would become a mess.

That's where clsx comes in.

It lets us specify the classes as keys and the values as the conditions.

It looks clean and is really convenient.

import clsx from "clsx";

export function Button({ isPrimary }) {
  return (
    <button
      className={clsx(`px-4 py-2 rounded`, {
        "bg-blue-500 text-white": isPrimary,
        "bg-gray-200 text-gray-800": !isPrimary,
      })}
    >
      Click me
    </button>
  );
}

`cn` into the picture

cn is a combines both twMerge and clsx.

import { clsx, type ClassValue } from "clsx";
import { twMerge } from "tailwind-merge";

export function cn(...inputs: ClassValue[]) {
  return twMerge(clsx(inputs));
}

And yeah, that's the story of cn.

The story behind Tailwind's CN function

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Comments

More from this blog

Seen this as a tailwind coder?

Class conflicts

Conditional classes

cn into the picture

`cn` into the picture