Ideally, apps like Git Tower could manage your Git Repos and also handle FTP, uploading files on command that it knows are out of date.

For those stuck on FTP⁴ workflows who aren't afraid of command line stuff, this looks promising.

The Other CSS Preprocessors

As I've made clear, I've chosen SASS for now as my CSS preprocessor of choice. But what about LESS and Stylus?

LESS was the first one I tried and honestly I still like it. I quite like how all the classes you write are automatically re-useable as mixins. Like:

.screen-reader-text {
//AN_Xml:   position: absolute;
//AN_Xml:   top: -9999px;
//AN_Xml:   left: -9999px;
//AN_Xml:}
//AN_Xml:label {
//AN_Xml:  .screen-reader-text;
//AN_Xml:}

That's darn useful and more succinct than SASS would be. But I've been told that mixing classes and the concept of mixins together is fundamentally flawed. I'm not sure how, but there you have it. If someone wants to explain that I'd be anxious to hear.

One major turnoff I had with LESS was when I was getting errors just by using the standard @keyframe animation syntax. So ultimately I had to break that stuff off into another file, but those files had to be .css so as to not trigger the error, then I also couldn't @import them (literally include contents) because of the file extension. Maybe they've fixed that, not sure.

Stylus is nice too, largely because of it's flexibility. It's not going to bitch at you nearly as much as the others. Things like braces and semicolons are optional, not required one way or the other. While Stylus is nice and powerful and robust, I ultimately think the development behind it isn't strong enough to instill confidence in me. It's largely one dude (TJ Holowaychuk).

SASS ultimately won out because it's the most mature, easiest to find information and help about, seems to have the most active and robust development, and has the least bugs.

Tutorials Around Here and Final Words

Just for the record, I'm not going to start putting SASS in basic CSS tutorials around here. CSS will very likely outlive SASS. And besides, I think understanding CSS is far more important than some specific preprocessor way of doing things. In fact, if a CSS newbie asked me if they should learn SASS as they are learning CSS, I'd probably say no. Learn how CSS works and then later see how preprocessors can help you. That's the opposite of how I feel about JavaScript and jQuery, where I feel learning jQuery first is fine. Weird.

Essentially I think you should know what writing really good CSS is like. What that final CSS file looks like. The very file that the browser reads and processes to style websites. Then use a preprocessor to make that final, fabulous CSS file easier to write and maintain.

Point being: Write your sass/less so that the output is exactly how you would have written your CSS without it.

//AN_Xml:

— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) February 2, 2012

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