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jamiebuilds/tailwindcss-animate
A Tailwind CSS plugin for creating beautiful animations
A Tailwind CSS plugin that adds fine-grained animation utilities — enter/exit transitions, fill modes, play state, iteration count, and directional slides. It's the animation layer that shadcn/ui and similar component libraries depend on under the hood. If you're building a component library or any UI with modal/dropdown transitions, this fills a genuine gap in Tailwind core.
The enter/exit animation model (`animate-in`/`animate-out` combined with `fade-in`, `zoom-in`, `slide-in-from-*`) composes cleanly with existing Tailwind utilities and maps directly to CSS custom properties, so duration and delay classes just work. Covers the full CSS animation spec surface — fill mode, play state, iteration count, direction — things Tailwind core deliberately left out. `prefers-reduced-motion` works out of the box via the existing `motion-safe`/`motion-reduce` variants with no extra config. It's a single small JS file, no runtime overhead.
Last meaningful activity was mid-2024 and the repo has 66 forks against 3k stars, which is a low fork ratio suggesting minimal community contribution — if something breaks with Tailwind v4, you're waiting on one maintainer. The plugin predates Tailwind v4's new CSS-first config model and there's no indication it supports it; adopters on v4 may find the `require()` plugin approach doesn't work at all. No staggered animation support — building a list that animates items in sequence still requires custom CSS or a JS animation library. The docs reference a `/docs/` folder that's just markdown files in the repo, not a deployed site, which is friction for anyone trying to look something up quickly.