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Less vs Stylus: What are the differences?
Less: The dynamic stylesheet language. Less is a CSS pre-processor, meaning that it extends the CSS language, adding features that allow variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques that allow you to make CSS that is more maintainable, themable and extendable; Stylus: Expressive, robust, feature-rich CSS language built for nodejs. Stylus is a revolutionary new language, providing an efficient, dynamic, and expressive way to generate CSS. Supporting both an indented syntax and regular CSS style.
Less and Stylus belong to "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" category of the tech stack.
"Better than css" is the primary reason why developers consider Less over the competitors, whereas "Simple" was stated as the key factor in picking Stylus.
Less is an open source tool with 16K GitHub stars and 3.46K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Less's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Less has a broader approval, being mentioned in 496 company stacks & 168 developers stacks; compared to Stylus, which is listed in 69 company stacks and 45 developer stacks.
Originally, I was going to start using Sass with Parcel, but then I learned about Stylus, which looked interesting because it can get the property values of something directly instead of through variables, and PostCSS, which looked interesting because you can customize your Pre/Post-processing. Which tool would you recommend?
JSS is makes a lot of sense when styling React components and styled-components is a really nice implementation of JSS. I still get to write pure CSS, but in a more componentized way. With CSS post-processors like SASS and LESS, you spend a lot of time deciding where your .scss or .less files belong, which classes should be shared, and generally fighting the component nature of React. With styled-components, you get the best of CSS and React. In this project, I have ZERO CSS files or global CSS classes and I leverage mixins quite a bit.
Pros of Less
- Better than css215
- Variables177
- Mixins141
- Maintainable99
- Used by bootstrap79
- Open source56
- Extendable50
- Functions43
- Dynamic39
- Fast30
- CSS is valid LESS, very easy to pick up2
Pros of Stylus
- Simple69
- Indented syntax54
- Efficient38
- Built for node.js33
- Open source32
- Expressive24
- Maintainable21
- Feature-rich17
- Better than CS13
- Variables6
- Functions5
- @extend directive3
- Contempt for curly brackets2
- Very clean2
- Mixins2
- Is Easy2
- No colons, semi-colons or even curly braces2
- Its unique1
- Dynamic selectors1
- Scriptable1
- Easy Efficiently1
- Transparent1
- Supports orthogonal architecture1
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What is Less?
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