
Twitter's Bootstrap hit 100,000 stars on GitHub - mosen
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/stargazers
======
zeta0134
Bootstrap is a lovely little thing. I use it for all new projects, as it
kindly stops me from being nerd-sniped by CSS features and cross-browser
comparability quirks. I usually end up needing to supplement it or replace it
eventually, but it gives you so much for so little.

~~~
nstart
This!! All my little dashboards and apps I use bootstrap for them initially.
Once they've come to a suitable position where the bootstrap framework gets in
the way by being a little clunky/big/not specialised enough in certain
ways/just looking boring (:D) I go ahead and rip it out. But that feels like
the whole point of a framework called bootstrap right? Like its name is
literally its purpose :).

~~~
WA
How do you rip it out if half of the HTML code is written only to suit
Bootstrap?

~~~
scrollaway
I'd like to know, too. I've been using bootstrap in a couple of places and
every time we change a page to use it, it feels like it'll be 10 times harder
to rip it out later.

Does anyone know of an scss-based UI framework, where I can just call mixins
into my css? Or is that even possible with bootstrap?

Adapting html to a UI framework's code feels like a completely upside down
approach.

~~~
nstart
Ok this is an excellent question. The way I do it is by first converting stuff
to semantic names. If it's a somewhat serious project I'm likely to have done
that from very early on. I use a method similar to
[https://www.sitepoint.com/sass-semantically-extend-
bootstrap...](https://www.sitepoint.com/sass-semantically-extend-bootstrap/)
to do this.

Later, I start converting this stuff to be what I actually want in either a
custom CSS or by integrating some other framework.

Note though. I explicitly mentioned this is for my little dashboards and apps.
When I start this process, pages will look broken from time to time and there
might be pages that look Frankensteined. I've never done this on a serious app
although I want to do that for one client I'm consulting for. Since I wrote
all the code myself, here's my speculation on how I'll do it.

Since I have a fairly structured way of arranging my divs and my forms, I'm
going to hack together a parser using beautifulsoup/htmlparser to get the
bootstrap stuff out and convert those to semantic names. So it'll be something
that goes through a file, and then tells me it found a div.row here (show me
the surrounding lines to get me an idea of where it is) and then ask me to
input the semantic name. It'll spew out the sass files I want and change the
jinja templates.

From there I'm going to attempt to plug in material just because I like it so
much :D

~~~
scrollaway
That seems like a lot of trouble to go through, to use a UI framework which is
supposed to save you time. :/

Do you have any recommendations on a better, leaner scss UI toolkit?

~~~
nstart
No I'm afraid I don't. You are right that this is a lot of pain for a UI
framework that's supposed to save you time. But because I've done this a few
times over it's become fairly simple once it's coupled together with some vim
macros and snippets. But it's not a very good workflow that someone else can
adopt quickly. I just found bootstrap to be super comfortable to get started
and I also built some generators that auto generate templates for me when I
work on my little projects. When I wrote those I made them to use bootstrap
and I can't be bothered going back to change them now

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whatnotests
Bootstrap is great and I'mma letchu finish, but [http://semantic-
ui.com/](http://semantic-ui.com/) is my favorite and I think everyone should
go take a quick look.

You might just like it too.

~~~
taspeotis
It's kind of ... heavy? Comparing minified files:

Bootstrap [1]: 118 KB

SemanticUI [2]: 537 KB

Don't forget to add the JavaScript. I know GZip is a thing, but still...

[1]
[https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/dist/css/boots...](https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css)

[2] [https://github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic-UI-
CSS/blob/master/...](https://github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic-UI-
CSS/blob/master/semantic.min.css)

~~~
ravenstine
If you are using LESS or Sass, it's really not hard at all to only include the
parts of Bootstrap that you need. In my experiences, I often need just need
maybe half of it and don't bother much with the Javascript stuff. I don't
think Bootstrap really has performance or size as a first priority. It's
really just a big toolkit, ready to go so you can whip out a functioning app.

~~~
djsumdog
This is true of a lot of frameworks. I've honestly not been a huge bootstrap
fan, and Foundation 5 and 6 also can be built with SASS and you can easily
remove components you don't use.

If you're trying to maximize compatibility while also get designs up quickly,
any modern framework is preferable to no framework at all.

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ZeroGravitas
Bootstrap? No one uses it any more, it's too popular.

\-- HN whenever Bootstrap comes up (paraphrasing Yogi Berra).

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_petronius
While we're plugging our favourite Bootstrap alternatives, I just want to give
a shoutout to Bourbon: [http://bourbon.io/](http://bourbon.io/)

I find it a lot more flexible than Bootstrap, but equally useful for
fundamentals and cross-browser support. It is also less opinionated about the
HTML markup and styling, at the cost of requiring more setup (rather than
just, say applying classes) than Bootstrap. But with the additional modules of
Neat, Bitters, and Refills, you can get the same sort of UI suite going quite
easily.

~~~
kowdermeister
This is apples vs. hammer comparison. Totally different tools for different
purposes.

Bootstrap is for copy-paste website/app sketching and bourbon is for speeding
up SASS coding. I tried it, but I ended up using 1-2 functions of it, so it
got dropped.

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trumbitta2
Please, stop referring to it as "Twitter" Bootstrap. The "Twitter" part has
been ditched since - idk - 2014

~~~
ceejayoz
In fairness, the Github org is still called "twbs".

~~~
trumbitta2
It's not "still" called "twbs".

It was called "twbs" when they moved the project out of the "twitter"
organization as a way of saying "hey! we love our past at twitter!" :)

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jvannistelrooy
Loved it, but doesn't it look like development has stagnated with version 4
still being in alpha?

~~~
tomhoward
There was a discussion about this a couple of weeks ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12435425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12435425)

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ramanathanrv
Well deserved!

I remember that before BootStrap came to the scene, we used to work with
BluePrint CSS. BluePrint gave a nice canvas and concealed all the IE6 related
issues. However, once Google Chrome became mainstream, it was time to move up
to the next level. BootStrap emerged to the scene and completely won over so
many hearts. The world is a better place because of BootStrap! Many many
thanks for the team that put this together.

------
joeblau
Is this number 1? I remember there was a rankings page but I can't seem to
find it.

~~~
mosen
Second (in terms of stars); "FreeCodeCamp" has over 170k, because part of its
onboarding encourages you to star the repo.

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renownedmedia
That's more than double the stars jQuery has:
[https://github.com/jquery/jquery](https://github.com/jquery/jquery)

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andegre
Wait, are we talking about SemanticUI or Bootstrap here?

~~~
mosen
Bootstrap - was this meant as a comment thread reply?

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MOARDONGZPLZ
Bootstrap is awesome, but initial loading of my apps was taking a while. I
reconfigured to use the Skeleton framework. Not nearly as feature packed, but
works amazing well at a very tiny fraction of Bootstrap's size.

[http://getskeleton.com/](http://getskeleton.com/)

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cloudjacker
I just like the neat and intuitive column block classes. I would have never
done something so organized myself.

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the_common_man
Which project has most stars? Is there a list?

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bart3r
[https://github.com/search?q=stars:%3E1&s=stars&type=Reposito...](https://github.com/search?q=stars:%3E1&s=stars&type=Repositories)

~~~
kyriakos
I'm surprised how many stars Font-Awesome has. If you consider that using
fonts for icons is an anti-pattern the fact that a font icon is so popular is
mind boggling.

p.s. don't get me wrong I use it myself

~~~
grenoire
Unfortunately styling SVGs is still not particularly convenient yet.

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matude
Foundation 6 > Bootstrap 3. Especially if you need easier customizability.

~~~
seattle_spring
Doesn't Foundation require jQuery? Seems like it's a non-starter for anything
written in the past 2 years. Maybe Bootstrap does too, I haven't used it in
ages.

~~~
ci5er
Really? I've subscribed to a few web SAAS apps recently and they all seem to
have most of their requisite jquery (in one case, quite a bit of the whole
thing) compiled into their app.js.

What are people doing? Going commando?

~~~
random_rr
Using React, other frameworks with virtual DOMs. jQuery isn't as useful for
managing vDOM's :)

~~~
ci5er
Fair enough. I don't do a lot of event dispatching (well, bubbling), so I
haven't found it a clear win for my use case, but it's only 10k more than
jQuery (gzipped), so I can see that it would be good for a lot of them. As I
move to something more componentized instead of the goulash I have now, I
suspect that this will change.

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EugeneOZ
Well deserved, congrats!

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chj
Love it. Just gave it the 101120th star.

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Enindu
I'm also one of 100,000

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aporetics
Well, NOW I'll use it

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halis
1 star for every KB it takes up?

