Tailwind has Open-sourced the V4 Alpha

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Tailwind has Open-sourced the V4 Alpha image

The Tailwind team announced that they are open-sourcing their progress on the Tailwind CSS v4 alpha. This version is a very early peek into something that will be an incredible way to write CSS for web applications.

Here’s what we know from the announcement about V4 so far:

Tailwind V4 will still support tailwind.config.js to make migrating to v4 easy, but the future is a CSS-first configuration experience:

@import "tailwindcss";
 
@theme {
--color-*: initial;
 
--color-gray-50: #f8fafc;
--color-gray-100: #f1f5f9;
--color-gray-200: #e2e8f0;
/* ... */
--color-green-800: #3f6212;
--color-green-900: #365314;
--color-green-950: #1a2e05;
}

Another feature from the announcement post that caught my eye was the zero-configuration content detection. Tailwind will crawl your project, looking for template files and using built-in heuristics to find templates. The stable v4 release will include support for explicitly defined content paths, but I love the overall aim of less or zero configuration in V4 😍

The v4 engine is a ground-up rewrite, taking all the learnings so far and making things faster. Here is what we know about the new engine so far:

  • Up to 10x faster
  • A smaller footprint
  • It’s using Rust in expensive and parallelizable parts of the framework
  • Only one dependency (Lightening CSS)

For those ready to try it out, remember that this is an alpha build, and the team has a lot more work to get to V4. You can get started with the Alpha in a few ways: Vite, PostCSS, or CLI. See the “Try out the Alpha” section of the release announcement to get started.

See Open-sourcing our progress on Tailwind CSS v4.0 for the full announcement!

Paul Redmond photo

Staff writer at Laravel News. Full stack web developer and author.

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