What is stylus?
Stylus is a robust, expressive, and feature-rich CSS preprocessor that provides a powerful and efficient way to write CSS. It supports both an indented syntax and regular CSS style. Stylus helps in writing clean and manageable stylesheets, allowing the use of variables, mixins, functions, and many other techniques that make CSS more maintainable and extendable.
What are stylus's main functionalities?
Variables
Variables in Stylus allow you to store values that can be reused throughout your stylesheet. This example defines a variable 'main-color' and applies it to the body's text color.
main-color = #333
body
color main-color
Mixins
Mixins in Stylus are a way to create reusable sets of properties. This mixin 'border-radius' applies the border radius across different browser prefixes and is used in a button.
border-radius(radius)
-webkit-border-radius radius
-moz-border-radius radius
border-radius radius
button
border-radius(5px)
Nesting
Nesting allows you to nest your CSS selectors in a way that follows the same visual hierarchy of your HTML. This example shows how to style a navigation bar using nesting.
nav
ul
margin 0
padding 0
list-style none
li
display inline-block
a
display block
padding 6px 12px
text-decoration none
Functions
Functions in Stylus can be defined to perform operations and can be used throughout the stylesheet. This example defines a simple 'add' function to calculate the sum of two values, used here to set padding.
add(a, b)
a + b
div
padding add(10px, 5px)
Other packages similar to stylus
sass
Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) is a CSS preprocessor similar to Stylus, offering features like variables, mixins, and nesting. Sass tends to have a larger community and more extensive framework support compared to Stylus.
less
Less (Leaner Style Sheets) is another CSS preprocessor that shares many features with Stylus, such as variables, mixins, and nesting. Less is often noted for its simplicity and ease of integration with other projects.
postcss
PostCSS is a tool for transforming CSS with JavaScript plugins. While it serves a different primary purpose compared to Stylus, it can be extended to offer similar functionalities through various plugins.