Stylus (style sheet language) explained

Stylus is a dynamic stylesheet preprocessor language that is compiled into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Its design is influenced by Sass and Less. It is regarded as the fourth most used CSS preprocessor syntax.^[3] It was created by TJ Holowaychuk, a former programmer for Node.js and the creator of the Luna language. It is written in JADE and Node.js.

Selectors

Unlike CSS, which uses braces to open and close declaration blocks, indentation is used. Additionally, semi-colons (;) are optionally omitted. Hence, the following CSS:body can be shortened to:body color: whiteFurther, colons (:) and commas are also optional; that means the above can be written as,body color white

Variables

Stylus allows variables to be defined, however unlike Less and Sass, it doesn't use a symbol to define variables. Additionally, variable assignment is done automatically by separating the property and keyword(s). In this way, variables are similar to the variables in Python.message = 'Hello, World!'

div::before content message color #ffffff

The Stylus compiler would translate the above document to:

div::before

Mixins and functions

Both mixins and functions are defined in the same manner, but they are applied in different ways.

For example, if you wanted to define the CSS border radius property without having to use various Vendor Prefixes you can create:

border-radius(n) -webkit-border-radius n -moz-border-radius n border-radius n

then, to include this as a mixin, you would reference it as:

div.rectangle border-radius(10px)

this would compile to:

div.rectangle

Interpolation

To include variables in arguments and identifiers, brace characters surround the variable(s). For example, -webkit- evaluates to -webkit-border-radius

External links

• • Stylus source code repository (Git)
• Source code comparison with Sass/SCSS and Less
• Online Stylus compiler

Notes and References

1. Web site: LICENSE. GitHub. 2015-03-26. 2015-12-21.
2. Web site: Release Notes. GitHub. 2024-03-05. 2021-04-06.
3. http://css-tricks.com/poll-results-popularity-of-css-preprocessors/ Poll Results: Popularity of CSS Preprocessors