Stylus (stylesheet language)

Stylus is a dynamic stylesheet language that is compiled into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Its design is influenced by Sass and LESS. It's regarded as the third most used CSS preprocessor syntax. 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, whitespace is used. Additionally, semi-colons (:) are optionally replaced by whitespace. So the following CSS:

body {
    color: white;
}

can be shortened to:

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 Python.

message = 'Hello, World!'

div:before
  content message
  color #ffffff

The Stylus compiler would translate the above document to:

div:before {
  content: 'Hello World';
  color: #ffffff;
}

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 translate to:

div.rectangle {
  -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
  -moz-border-radius: 10px;
  border-radius: 10px;
}

Interpolation

To include variables in arguments and identifiers, brace characters surround the variable(s). For example,

 -webkit-{'border' + '-radius'}

evaluates to

-webkit-border-radius

External links

• Official website
• Stylus source code repository (Git)
• Source code comparison with Sass/SCSS and LESS