The 'less' npm package is a pre-processor for CSS, which extends the capabilities of CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations, and functions. It allows developers to write CSS in a more maintainable and extendable way.
Variables
Variables allow you to specify widely used values in a single place, and then reuse them throughout the stylesheet, making your CSS more maintainable.
@primary-color: #4D9FEC;
a {
color: @primary-color;
}Mixins
Mixins allow you to embed all the properties of a class into another class by simply including the class name as one of its properties. It's like variables, but for whole classes.
.bordered {
border-top: dotted 1px black;
border-bottom: solid 2px black;
}
#menu a {
.bordered;
}Nested Rules
Nested rules make it possible to nest selectors inside other selectors. This makes the structure of your CSS mirror the structure of your HTML.
#header {
color: black;
.navigation {
font-size: 12px;
}
.logo {
width: 300px;
}
}Functions & Operations
Functions and operations let you manipulate numbers and colors, doing math with them and applying functions to achieve dynamic results.
@base: 5%;
.padding {
padding: @base * 2;
}Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) is a mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language. It provides similar features to Less, such as variables, mixins, and nested rules. Sass has two syntaxes: the original 'indent' syntax that is similar to Haml and the newer 'SCSS' that uses braces like CSS. It's one of the most popular CSS preprocessors.
Stylus is a preprocessor that offers a mix of features from both Sass and Less, as well as some additional unique features. It has a more flexible syntax that can be written with or without braces, colons, and semicolons. Stylus provides powerful and efficient stylesheet writing capabilities.
PostCSS is a tool for transforming CSS with JavaScript plugins. These plugins can lint your CSS, support variables and mixins, transpile future CSS syntax, inline images, and more. PostCSS is different from preprocessors like Sass and Less in that it's modular and can be configured to perform a wide variety of tasks.
The dynamic stylesheet language.
This is the JavaScript, and now official, stable version of LESS.
For more information on the language and usage visit lesscss.org. More information also available in our wiki
See LICENSE file.
Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Alexis Sellier & The Core Less Team
FAQs
Leaner CSS
The npm package less receives a total of 5,302,892 weekly downloads. As such, less popularity was classified as popular.
We found that less demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 5 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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