CSS Extraction Library for Vite and Preact
Postedabout 2 months ago
github.comTechstory
supportivepositive
Debate
0/100
CSS-in-JsVitejsPreact
Key topics
CSS-in-Js
Vitejs
Preact
The author introduces a new CSS extraction library for Vite and Preact, inspired by styled-components and EmotionCSS, and shares its development motivation.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Light discussionFirst comment
N/A
Peak period
1
Start
Avg / period
1
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Nov 11, 2025 at 12:08 PM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 11, 2025 at 12:08 PM EST
0s after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
1 comments in Start
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 11, 2025 at 12:08 PM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45889906Type: storyLast synced: 11/17/2025, 6:01:03 AM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
I wanted something more optimized than other CSS-in-JS alternatives that generate CSS at runtime, so I created a ViteJS plugin. It extracts all style snippets, replaces them with classes like css-a1b2c3, and injects all the corresponding styles into a CSS file in place of an @extracted-css directive.
This provides a better experience than Tailwind, as you can use all CSS language features without learning new conventions while maintaining a per-component styling approach. This turns out to be more inspectable in the browser's dev-tools, as snippets are extracted as-is and are not fragmented across thousands of small classes.
There is also a preact options hook that adds a custom classList attribute, which maps to clsx for easy class composition (similarly to VueJS, Svelte, etc.).
P.S. I know other frameworks exist, but I have really been enjoying using Preact for frontend development recently.