Stylist
Define and hot-reload UI styles for iOS apps using external YAML or JSON theme files.
What is Stylist?
Stylist is a Swift library for iOS that allows developers to define UI styles in external YAML or JSON theme files, enabling hot-reloading for instant visual updates without recompiling the app. It solves the problem of hardcoded styles by centralizing styling logic, making it easier to maintain and update app appearances dynamically.
iOS developers and teams building UIKit-based applications who need a flexible, maintainable way to manage UI styles and support dynamic theming.
Developers choose Stylist for its hot-reloading capability, which dramatically speeds up UI development, and its declarative, CSS-like approach that simplifies style management and enables runtime theme swapping.
Overview
Define UI styles for iOS apps in a hot-reloadable yaml or json file
Use Cases
Best For
- Rapid UI iteration with hot-reloading during iOS app development
- Building apps that require dynamic theme switching at runtime
- Centralizing UI styles in a single source of truth for large iOS projects
- Applying consistent styling across UIView and UIViewController hierarchies
- Creating design systems with reusable style variables and inheritance
- Styling custom UIKit components with strongly typed properties
Not Ideal For
- iOS projects built entirely with SwiftUI, as Stylist is UIKit-specific and doesn't integrate with SwiftUI's declarative framework
- Apps with very simple, static UIs where the overhead of external theme files and library dependency isn't justified
- Teams that require all styling logic to be in Swift code for strict type safety without external parsing or file management
Pros & Cons
Pros
Changes in YAML/JSON theme files are reflected immediately without recompiling, using the watch function with animation support to speed up UI iteration dramatically.
Uses CSS-like selectors and variables in external files, enabling a single source of truth for styles and easy dynamic theme swapping at runtime.
Works with UIKit classes and Interface Builder, allowing styles to be set programmatically or via IB attributes, as shown in the property inspector example.
Supports adding strongly typed custom properties for any view through the Styleable protocol, allowing dynamic styling of custom components with type safety.
Cons
As noted in the README, if a style property is removed from a theme, Stylist cannot revert the view to its previous state, potentially leaving inconsistent UI elements.
Designed exclusively for UIKit, making it incompatible with SwiftUI-based projects or cross-platform development, which limits adoption in modern iOS apps.
The CSS-like selector syntax for view hierarchies can be intricate and may lead to specificity conflicts or debugging challenges, especially in large codebases.
Frequently Asked Questions
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