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tailwindcss-unimportant

A Tailwind CSS plugin that creates lower-specificity utility classes that can be used to create components with overridable defaults.

Installation

npm install tailwindcss-unimportant

Add the tailwindcss-unimportant plugin to your tailwind.config.js file.

// tailwind.config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [require('tailwindcss-unimportant')],
}

Note: if you need to specify the important option in your tailwind configuration, you will need to pass it in as an option to the plugin.

// tailwind.config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [require('tailwindcss-unimportant')({ important: '[my-custom-selector]' })],
}

Getting started

To make a class unimportant, use the -: variant.

<p class="-:font-bold">Hello world</p>

These classes will always have lower precedence than classes without the variant.

// The text will have normal or bold weight depending on the order of the
// `font-bold` and `font-normal` classes in the compiled CSS.
<p class="font-bold font-normal">Hello world</p>

// The text will always have normal weight
<p class="-:font-bold font-normal">Hello world</p>

This is useful when making components where you want to be able to override the default classes.

/// paragraph.blade.php
<p {{ 
    $attributes->merge(['class' => '-:text-base -:font-normal'])
}}>
    {{ $slot }}
</p>

/// index.blade.php
// The classes in the paragraph component have lower specificity so we can
// easily override them.
<x-paragraph class="text-lg font-bold">Hello world!</x-paragraph>

Making classes even more unimportant

Sometimes it's useful to extend components within other components, and you can run into the same problem of clashing Tailwind classes.

This plugin provides additional class variants for up to 10 levels of unimportance: --:, ---:, ----:, etc.

// -:text-blue takes precedence over --:text-green, which takes precedence over
// ---:text-red
<a class="---:text-red --:text-green -:text-blue">
    The link is blue
</a>

As the variants become larger, you may prefer to use the number variants, where the lowest number takes precedence: --1:, --2:, --3:, etc. The number and symbol variants can be used interchangeably.

// This example is identical to the previous example
<a class="--5:text-red --:text-green --1:text-blue">
    The link is blue
</a>

Arbitrary values are also supported. For example, --[5]: is equivalent to -----:. Zero and negative values can be used to make classes of higher precedence.

Unimportance	Symbolic variant	Numberic variant
1	-:	--1:
2	--:	--2:
3	---:	--3:
4	----:	--4:
5	-----:	--5:
6	------:	--6:
7	-------:	--7:
8	--------:	--8:
9	---------:	--9:
10	----------:	--10:
n	n/a	--[n]:

How it works

The -: variant wraps the selector for a given class in the css :where() function, reducing its specificity to 0-0-0. This means classes you use without the unimportant variant will be applied preferentially.

/* Specificity of 0-1-0 */
.bg-white

/* Specificity of 0-0-0 */
:where(.-\:bg-white)

However, having a specificity of 0-0-0 means that the default tailwind base rules and any base rules you create will take precedence over the unimportant classes. In many cases, this makes the unimportant classes useless.

<style>
/* Specificity of 0-0-1 */
a {
    color: blue;
}

/* Specificity of 0-0-0 */
:where(.-\:text-red) {
    color: red;
} 
</style>

<a class="-:text-red">The link is blue</a>

To fix this problem, the plugin sets the important Tailwind configuration option to :root. This increases the specificity of all Tailwind classes by 0-1-0, meaning our unimportant classes now have a higher specificity than the base rules.

<style>
/* Specificity of 0-0-1 */
a {
    color: blue;
}

/* Specificity of 0-2-0 */
:root .text-green {
    color: green;
}

/* Specificity of 0-1-0 */
:root :where(.-\:text-red) {
    color: red;
}
</style>

<a class="-:text-red">The link is red</a>
<a class="-:text-red text-green">The link is green</a>

Levels of unimportance

Classes with greater levels of unimportance are output first in the generated CSS file so that the less unimportant classes take precedence.

/* The more unimportant class is output first */
.--\:bg-white {...}

/* The later CSS rule takes precedence */
.-\:bg-black {...}