[v4] What is a realistic minimum file size with v4?

[jwilges]

I noticed my file sizes went up on a few projects when I transitioned from v3 to v4.

As a quick gut check, I followed the CLI setup example in the documentation in an empty working directory. I'm surprised to see it starts out at ~18kB:

$ npx @tailwindcss/cli -i ./src/base.css -o ./src/base-minified.css --minify && wc -m src/base-minified.css
≈ tailwindcss v4.0.6

Done in 45ms
   17957 src/base-minified.css

Is this really the smallest you can get, or am I missing something? The example page only includes a few classes: text-3xl font-bold underline. It doesn't seem like unused classes are purged at all.

[adamwathan]

There's a lot of additional boilerplate from the CSS variables we include in the output at the moment. We're planning to remove unused CSS variables as well and even shipped a release that included an early implementation, but had to revert because of an issue we discovered after release. We'll continue to get it trimmed down though 👍

[jwilges]

Great to hear, thank you for confirming my suspicion. I searched the documentation, upgrade guide, and a few issues but wasn't seeing a concrete answer. It was also unsettling to see no notable mentions around --minify and optimizing for production in the v4 documentation. This isn't a dig against the project or the new version, just initial feedback from someone upgrading from v3. It was shocking to see such a massive output with no obvious path to start purging it down beyond throwing out the default theme which sort of defeats the purpose.