Thanks for the kind feedback! I totally get the appeal of daisyUI – super quick to drop in and great for prototyping.
With TemplUI, I’m aiming for a more minimal, dependency-free setup – no extra Tailwind plugins or runtime JS unless absolutely needed. The idea is to stay as close to the metal as possible and let devs build their own design system on top, rather than fight against a pre-styled one.
It's less “drop-in UI kit” and more “starter kit to build your own.” That makes it more customizable and hopefully a better fit for projects that want full control.
Originally, I had templUI components available via Go module imports, but there were a few real issues:
- Tailwind v4+ with CSS-only config needs hardcoded paths to `.templ` files. That clashed in teams where Go paths differed (e.g. `~/dev`, `~/code`, etc.).
- It made Git diffs messy – you had `.templ` and `.go` files being imported per component.
- Updating components via module versions often led to unwanted breaking changes – not easy to "just use one component" from a newer version.
- Workarounds like Makefile tricks for Tailwind `src` path felt too hacky.
The CLI avoids all that. It copies clean files into your codebase, so it's portable, version-safe, and no import path magic needed.
That said – I’m open to feedback. If there's a solid reason to bring back module imports (optionally), I’m listening!
Mostly for building typed web UIs in Go – instead of using html/template, which isn’t typed and feels oldschool. templ makes Go feel way more modern for frontend work.
I know I am an old angry guy but I really don't want things to 'feel' (not sure what that even is) more modern; I have projects that bring me millions a year which are running for over 2 decades now and this kind of 'modern' is just obsolete next year. I like profit and not being bothered by updates every 5 seconds. I have a simple stack, my saas apps are violently fast and they run for decades without me touching anything but some bugs/features. The modern feel is not required and in fact detrimental to just making bucketloads of business value and company wealth imho. But then again, we never had investors, so I don't know how it feels to burn other people's money.
These are weird things to complain about for templ - it’s very boring and stable and it just compiles to very boring Go code while 1) providing type safety for your templates and 2) being less annoying to compose things than template.html.
It definitely doesn’t feel like JSX or any other modern/exciting thing to me.
Yep, that makes sense. I do prefer Go to TS really as I love typesystems but TS types often are completely unreadable. I am a Haskell guy and not entirely sure how they managed to make TS types this line noisy and, frankly, a struggle.
