Is Theme-UI dying..?

[pkieltyka]

Hi there, I'm just wondering if theme-ui is still being maintained and in active development? I am surprised by the slow pace its taking to port to TS given that most of the work is already completed, but seems no urgency to actually make a release? Further, there are a growing number of issues and PRs that are also unattended..?

it would be helpful to understand the intentions and plan or I'll likely migrate away from theme-ui

[atanasster]

i am just a (very active) user, and it doesn' seem theme-ui is dying as it keeps getting (small) updates, including for TS. Special thanks to @hasparus . What parts of theme-ui are you using?

But I do agree it seems a bit disconnected. I am not sure who is actually making "releases" and what are the steps to close up on a release.

For my part I would love to contribute in some way, but am rarely getting any feedback or direction where the lib is going or much of a sense of community. Some of the more successful OSS projects do have an advisory board of some sore and a roadmap, maybe this will help?

[deadcoder0904]

Would love to get an update on this from the team :)

[hasparus]

Okay, I think I can shed some light on the situation.

jxnblk has given me permissions to publish Theme UI to NPM few days ago (it was a bit harded than expected as we had a few hiccups with Lerna and NPM orgs), so we can start releasing bugfixes to 0.3 and deliver TS rewrite with 0.4.

I'm saying we, as I will certainly fail to do it alone, as I'm a bit preocuppied with protesting (:hankey: has hit the fan in the place I live), a full time job to pay the bills and other projects. Fortunately, I can think of a few talented prior contributors we could get in touch with. I hope we can push something forward together.

As of the question... Code once published to NPM is immutable, and will live forever in the package heaven registry.
I'm using Theme UI in a bunch of projects, and in some of them the migration to other styling solution like Stitches or Tailwind would be impossible.

Some of the more successful OSS projects do have an advisory board of some sore and a roadmap, maybe this will help

This is certainly a good idea.

For my part I would love to contribute in some way, but am rarely getting any feedback or direction where the lib is going or much of a sense of community.

@atanasster, would you like to talk in DMs or by a Zoom/Whereby call to figure out how you could contribute?

[atanasster]

@hasparus - thanks a lot for the update - I am sure most OOS projects hit some roadblocks at some point in their existence, so it was mostly the lack of feedback that was worrisome. I am glad you have a lot invested in theme-ui already and plan on keeping using it, I am in a similar boat :)

Yes, I would like to get on a chat/zoom, I am in Florida on East coast timezone but a bit of a late-morning person.

[hasparus]

it would be helpful to understand the intentions and plan or I'll likely migrate away from theme-ui

@pkieltyka, I suppose there could be two reasons for migrating away now

1. Performance. It would take a lot of effort to get Theme UI close to build-time solutions performance like @compiled/css-in-js or Tailwind. Precompiling sx prop in babel plugin is possible, but quite hard.
2. No support for JSX automatic runtime, as Emotion doesn't have that yet. It's an annoying pain point, because automatic is the new default.

[pkieltyka]

Emotion 11 is going to be shipping their final release soon and I believe has support for new JSX transform.

My issue with theme-ui is the development has stagnated very much and yet it’s so close to accomplishing the version port to typescript to offer a better experience.

I agree a compiled css with a similar experience to theme-ui would be awesome and maybe that’ll come in future works as underlining libraries mature.. another one to track is https://linaria.dev/

Finally I’ve recently been looking to switch away from theme-ui given that it looks like it’s hit a wall in dev, and came across chakra ui which is clearly heavily inspired by theme-ui but is much more actively maintained.

FYI, if there was a roadmap for theme-ui with a real effort, I’d be happy to sponsor/donate

[deadcoder0904]

Thanks, @hasparus for your contributions. Unfortunately, I switched to Tailwind 2 days ago as I hit a few roadblocks. I'll probably come back when it gets more matured :)

[hasparus]

@deadcoder0904 Thanks! Tailwind is great though. Frankly speaking, I'd recommend it over any CSS-in-JS library any time you don't need your styles to be in JS / don't need them at runtime.

[dcastil]

Support for automatic JSX runtime is coming in #1237. 😊

[atanasster]

@dcastil thats awesome, i was really looking forward to this.