stylus

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.

README

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.

Installation

$ npm install stylus -g

Basic Usage

Watch and compile a stylus file from command line with

stylus -w style.styl -o style.css

You can also try all stylus features on stylus-lang.com, build something with stylus on codepen or RunKit

IDE/Editor Support

IDE/Editor	built-in support	guide	plugin support
WebStorm	✅  bug report	Using stylus with webstorm	N/A
VSCode	❌	N/A	Stylus(maintainer: @iChenLei @d4rkr00t)
Sublime 2/3	❌	N/A	Stylus(maintainer: @billymoon)
Atom	❌	N/A	Stylus(maintainer: @matthojo)
Vim	❌	N/A	vim-stylus(maintainer: @iloginow)

Missing your favorite IDE/Editor support ? Please report to us via stylus issues

Modern bundler/task-runner Support

Bundler	built-in support	guide	plugin support
webpack	✅	Using stylus with webpack	stylus-loader
vite	✅	Using stylus with vite	N/A
parcel	✅	Using stylus with parcel v1 | v2	N/A
fuse-box	✅	Using stylus with fuse-box	N/A
snowpack	❌	Snowpack plugins guide	snowpack-plugin-stylus
gulp	❌	N/A	gulp-stylus
grunt	❌	N/A	grunt-contrib-stylus
rollup	❌	N/A	rollup-plugin-stylus-compiler

Missing your favorite modern bundler/task-runner support ? Please report to us via stylus issues

Example

border-radius()
  -webkit-border-radius: arguments
  -moz-border-radius: arguments
  border-radius: arguments

body a
  font: 12px/1.4 "Lucida Grande", Arial, sans-serif
  background: black
  color: #ccc

form input
  padding: 5px
  border: 1px solid
  border-radius: 5px

compiles to:

body a {
  font: 12px/1.4 "Lucida Grande", Arial, sans-serif;
  background: #000;
  color: #ccc;
}
form input {
  padding: 5px;
  border: 1px solid;
  -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
  -moz-border-radius: 5px;
  border-radius: 5px;
}

the following is equivalent to the indented version of Stylus source, using the CSS syntax instead:

border-radius() {
  -webkit-border-radius: arguments
  -moz-border-radius: arguments
  border-radius: arguments
}

body a {
  font: 12px/1.4 "Lucida Grande", Arial, sans-serif;
  background: black;
  color: #ccc;
}

form input {
  padding: 5px;
  border: 1px solid;
  border-radius: 5px;
}

Features

Stylus has many features. Detailed documentation links follow:

• css syntax support
• mixins
• keyword arguments
• variables
• interpolation
• arithmetic, logical, and equality operators
• importing of other stylus sheets
• introspection api
• type coercion
• @extend
• conditionals
• iteration
• nested selectors
• parent reference
• in-language functions
• variable arguments
• built-in functions (over 60)
• optional image inlining
• optional compression
• JavaScript API
• extremely terse syntax
• stylus executable
• error reporting
• single-line and multi-line comments
• css literal
• character escaping
• @keyframes support & expansion
• @font-face support
• @media support
• Connect Middleware
• TextMate bundle
• Coda/SubEtha Edit Syntax mode
• gedit language-spec
• VIM Syntax
• Espresso Sugar
• Firebug extension
• heroku web service for compiling stylus
• style guide parser and generator
• transparent vendor-specific function expansion

Community modules

• https://github.com/stylus/stylus/wiki

Stylus cheatsheet

• Stylus cheatsheet, very useful stylus syntax code snippet for you

Authors

• TJ Holowaychuk (tj)

More Information

• Language comparisons, compare Less Sass and Stylus.

Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) Automattic <developer.wordpress.com>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.