Chapter 2. Building a Less Development Toolkit

We've covered the principles behind Less, and saw how it can help reduce the effort required to manage style sheets with the use of variables, functions, and mixins. We're almost ready to start coding, but before we can do so, there's one small thing missing—we need some tools!

You might wonder whether there is a need for more tools, given that CSS is just plain text and that we don't need anything to edit plain text files, right? Well, plain text editors will work, but as we'll see in this chapter, there are tools available that include support for Less in order to help make editing files easier.

Throughout this chapter, we will look at a selection of tools that you may find useful for working with Less; we will install a selection that will be used for the purposes of the exercises throughout this book, although you can always pick and choose the packages you prefer to use.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Choosing and installing an editor to work with Less files
• Watching out for changes to Less files
• Debugging in browsers
• Tools for compiling the Less code
• Automating the development using tools such as Node and Grunt

Note

The software that we install in this chapter will be for Windows, as this is the author's preferred development platform; comments will be added to indicate whether alternatives for Apple Mac or Linux are available.