Cells

A strongly opinionated modular utility-first CSS library.

Why

Cells looks like just any another utility-first CSS library like bootstrap, tailwind and unocss, but it has a slightly different scope. The library is designed to work as a configurable primer for themable components library and frontend skeletons.

Since it does not try to cover the entire styling experience of a project, it does not require build-time optimizations. You can import base custom properties and classes using plain CSS imports and load opinionated rules from the provided presets.

Please note that Cells does not aim to compete in the CSS frameworks market. It will evolve in the only interest of our development teams, but we are happy to share and discuss design choices with other developers.

Cells is distribuited as plain CSS files. You can import the whole library using the index.css file or single modules from the lib folder. Each module is configurable using CSS custom properties.

Implemented modules:

• Spacing defines base spacing variables
• Colors defines base theming variables such as primary, secondary and accent colors and base text and background colors classes
• Typography defines base variables for families, weights and size scale, as well as declinated classes for composition
• Layout contains classes for general grid layout, as well as utility classes for flexbox specs
• Paddings contains classes to set incremental paddings, from p-0 to p-10 and with px, py, pt, pr, pb, pl variants
• Margins contains classes to set incremental margins, from m-0 to m-10 and with mx, my, mt, mr, mb, ml variants
• Borders contains radius-N classes for rounded borders
• Shadows contains both classes for inset shadows, from deep-1 to deep-4, and drop shadows from elevation-0 to elevation-10 plus elevation-12, elevation-186 and elevation-24
• Outline customizes the global page outline for keyboard navigation
• Scollbar contains classes to customize scrollbars

Presets:

• Website configures the grid layout for each viewport (mobile 4 columns, tablet portrait 6 columns, tablet landscape 8 columns, desktop 12 columns)

Usage

You can install and consume Cells with npm:

$ npm i @chialab/cells
$ yarn add @chialab/cells

and import it in your stylesheet:

@import '@chialab/cells';

or using the unpkg CDN:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/@chialab/cells/lib/index.css" />

@import 'https://unpkg.com/@chialab/cells/lib/index.css';

Correctly set --window-width variable.

Viewport units (vw, vh) do not take into account scrollbars width. In Cells, we use the overflow: overlay; property in order to avoid horizontal scrolling when using 100vw in mobile viewports, but that property is not a safe cross-browser solution and will be removed in the next major iteration of Cells. From 1.5.0, to solve this problem we have introduced the --window-width variable that can be set using the following JavaScript snippet:

function updateViewportSize() {
    document.documentElement.style.setProperty('--window-width', `${document.body.clientWidth}px`);
};

updateViewportSize();
window.addEventListener('resize', updateViewportSize);

License

Cells is released under the MIT license.