Another Prettier killer has entered the villa

Issue #468.March 9, 2026.2 Minute read.
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Today’s issue: The campaign promises of import maps, the meaning of life React Fiber, and the resurrection of Flash.

Welcome to #468.

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The Main Thing

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Convincing your team to migrate formatters for the third time this year

Another Prettier killer has entered the villa

Oxfmt just shipped its first beta, and it could become the one true Prettier replacement that’s long been prophesied.

Quick review: As you might’ve guessed from the name, Oxfmt is the formatter arm of the Oxc toolchain that’s behind Oxlint and a few other Rust-based JS tools. And it’s not the first attempt to create “Prettier but fast” – Biome is another Rust-based formatter that’s seen its weekly downloads jump by 3.5x in the past year to over 6 mil.

The children clearly yearn for the Rust, but Oxfmt takes things to the next level. It’s 30x faster than Prettier and 3x faster than Biome on a cold run. And while Biome claims ~97% Prettier compatibility, Oxfmt now passes 100% of Prettier’s JS/TS conformance tests – which means you can migrate a large codebase without getting thousands of diffs.

Other highlights:

  • One formatter for your entire project – Oxfmt handles JS, TS, JSX, TSX, JSON, YAML, TOML, HTML, CSS, SCSS, Markdown, MDX, and more. No more duct-taping Prettier plus four plugins to cover all the file types in your monorepo.

  • Tailwind and import sorting are built in – No more needing prettier-plugin-tailwindcss, because Oxfmt handles Tailwind class sorting natively for both JS/TS and non-JS files. Import sorting also ships out of the box with full config options for groups, side effects, and newlines between sections.

  • Migration is a one-liner – pnpm add -D oxfmt && pnpm oxfmt --migrate prettier && pnpm oxfmt lets you install, migrate your config, and reformat your files. It’s already being used in production by projects like Vue, OpenClaw, and Turborepo.

Bottom Line: Prettier’s biggest competitive moat is that nobody wants to spend time migrating their formatter. But a one-line install with zero formatting diffs and 30x faster runs makes Oxfmt a pretty easy yes.

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Cool Bits

  1. shadcn/cli v4 comes with shadcn/skills, presets, dry-run, and lots more. shadcn supremacy shows no signs of slowing.

  2. Sanku wrote a deep dive on understanding why React Fiber exists. Still waiting for Sanku’s deep dive on why I exist, outside of my intrinsic longing to write newsletters and try out new flavors of Monster.

  3. Frontend Testing Best Practices Guide is a free resource that shows you how to efficiently create and maintain reliable frontend tests using Datadog. [sponsored]

  4. Lea Verou wrote an optimistic post called External import maps, today!. Yes 👏 we 👏 can 👏.

  5. Firefox 148 comes with a new Sanitizer API for untrusted HTML to prevent XSS vulnerabilities.

  6. Sergiy Dybskiy wrote on the Sentry blog about how one well-placed log saved him hours of debugging a nasty production issue in his Next.js application. Can you please place a bunch of logs in my Next.js application, Sergiy? I can pay you in Diet Coke. [sponsored]

  7. gws creator, Justin Poehnelt wrote about why you need to rewrite your CLI for AI agents.

  8. Bill Premo is rebuilding Flash with 2026 tech. I just hope he can rebuild all of our childhoods in the process.

  9. Ryan Toronto wrote a deep dive on error rendering with RSC.

  10. TanStack Intent is a CLI for shipping Agent Skills with your npm packages. That probably means we’re about 10 days away from that part of the cycle where people start tweeting about how “agent skills are dead and all the smart, beautiful people are actually using _______” - but let’s enjoy it while it lasts.