almost 9 years ago from Alec Molloy, Utopia
I am a front-end web developer who has been curious about precompilers for a while. My CSS files have been growing quite large lately and I was wondering what people use. It seems to be there are loads of articles on SASS, LESS, and SCSS, but I want to hear what the community here uses.
But why should he use SASS over LESS?
Last time someone asked this Sass won by some margin.
Sass + Bourbon.
Ha, you would like Bourbon.
The suite of Bourbon extensions are quickly becoming my favorites:
refills.bourbon.io http://neat.bourbon.io/
Once you go Sass you never go back!
LESS first, then switch to SASS later (or stick with LESS)
Agreed, use LESS if you feel that you need more switch to SASS. Personally still using LESS with LESS Hat
New kid on the block, Myth:
Its a polyfill for future versions of CSS. Lets you use real CSS3 features that aren't supported even by Firefox or Chrome (or Safari).
+1 for Sass
Personally, I've been using Sass. I'd argue that once you've learned one preprocessor using a different one just takes a couple minutes of looking over the documentation. LESS is considered one of the easier ones to setup though, which may be a deciding factor for you. I suggest trying them all out using something like http://codepen.io/
Another thing to keep in mind is that if you are a Bootstrap user that you can use either LESS and now officially, Sass. Foundation is still Sass only.
SASS + Compass with a guard or grunt watch file. If you do a lot of PSD-> HTML, look at CSSHAT and PNGHat photoshop plugins as well.
Agreed, SASS plus Compass is a great way to go. After using both SASS and LESS I've found that SASS is more powerful and it seems like it's also becoming the more popular option with front end devs. Compass makes SASS even more powerful with its library of mixins.
I should mention I use Brackets, which has a LESS compiler extension available. Unless there are really compelling reasons to choose other languages, I think LESS would win.
I use Brackets in concert with Prepros (for preprocessing, live browser refresh, and other nifty things.)
I use SASS and then Bourbon and Neat which are helpful.
Okay, so I think SASS wins out here. Thanks everyone who responded!
If you feel more like a designer than developer, want to do the job easier without learning programming stuff you should try CSSOnDiet
LibSASS & Gulp. Compiler wait times are in the milliseconds.
Not to beat a dead horse here, but I was originally developing with LESS, switched over to SASS about a year ago and have never looked back. And there really is a lot of momentum in the community currently.
I think will soon overtake (if it hasn't already) LESS and the rest in both popularity and power.
Definetively, SASS.
Once you nail SASS, you can nail LESS and others without much effort. Learning preprocessing shouldn't take that long if you're used to CSS, wich, if it is not the case, you should first invest effort in CSS than SASS.
SASS with the Bourbon library, which is lighter and smaller than Compass library. Compass if I have to.
To get easier started with SASS, on a Mac or PC, take a look at Scout App: http://mhs.github.io/scout-app/ It saves you the trouble of setting up your Ruby environment and all that stuff, which can be a pain on Windows
Sass + Compass. We have been collecting all the great community extensions and libraries over at http://www.sache.in/
Go with the one having the largest, still growing, community. I would say that's SCSS (Sass).
After learning on of them it's easy to pick up the other since they by and large do the same thing.
SASS + Bourbon + Codekit. I find typing {} and ; (among other things) in LESS to be more of a drag than it is useful. Once you start writing mixins, extends and functions you'll never go back.
Just pick whatever looks like it suits you better. It's not like you are learning a new language or framework. I personally prefer LESS, but a ton of people prefer SASS. Both work great, just pick whichever you think you would prefer.
Sass is a good place to start, though each preprocessor is more or less(no pun intended) the same. I recommend Dan Cederholm's book on Sass, it's a great overview on the subject.
At first I would advice you to try LESS because Sass can look a bit over-powered at first sight. Once you understand the concepts of LESS such as variables, mixins, nesting and includes, you may feel limited with LESS, and that's where Sass come in!
Sass is basically the badass brother of LESS, it's very powerful and can be extended with awesome plugins such as Compass. Then once you gone on Sass, you can't go back :D
Sass all the way.
http://cssondiet.com - a preprocessor for designers
I recently, past 3 months, learned how to use Sass (and compass). Learned how to use it in one night and had a working site with it in 1-2 months. Very easy to use and learn. I'm not a dev, but I would recommend it.
SASS. Check out http://mixture.io/ It has sped up my coding workflow a lot.
+1 for Mixture really useful tool.
For those of you who haven't seen mixture before it sits in between your editor and browser(s) It will live refresh as you save, compile all the common languages and alot more.
Its not free, but you can pick it up for a one time fee of $39. well worth it in my opinion
Just play with all of them, if you already know CSS it shouldn't take more than 15 minutes to get started.
False. Some run on Ruby, some on Node, some in the browser with JS. There is paid software out there that makes it easier, but you can't just swap one out for the other.
Also, to really learn SASS takes some time. 15mins might show oyu how "cool" it is, but you don't really get a feel for how powerful it is.
Just speaking from my experience, but I already had Ruby and Node installed.
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