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Mood
Asked: 2011-01-19 14:00:28 +0800 CST

LESS.app like application?

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Recently I found out about an OS X application called LESS.app. It’s basically an app to compile and minify *.less files into *.css files and does it in real-time. I want to know or I can archive the same thing in Ubuntu and how to go about it.

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6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Bryan here. Developer of Less.app.

    I highly recommend AGAINST using the older version of LESS (the Ruby-based one). Less.js isn't just a javascript port of LESS, it's a ground-up rewrite that improves a ton of stuff, adds support for things that the old Ruby version doesn't have, and increases compiler speed by about 84%.

    Rather than install the Ruby gem, install Node.js and run Less.js through Node from the command line. You'll still have all the -watch functionality, but you'll be using Less.js to do it, which means your life will be much better.

    Alternately, use Less.js as a script in the website you're creating. This will work for development. When you're done coding, simply copy the CSS that Less.js generates (from your browser's inspector) and place that into a file, add a .css extension, then remove the Less.js script tag from the HTML pages and substitute the CSS file you just created.

    Either way, use Less.js.

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  2. Note

    Read Bryan's answer. He knows what he's talking about. ;-)

    You can just install less.

    1. Install rubygems and less

      sudo apt-get install rubygems
sudo gem install less

    2. The official documentation remarks:

      To make gem work properly you should write gem's path to PATH add to ~/.bashrc:

       export PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH

    3. You can then use the less compiler by doing

      lessc style.less

    I don't think there's a GUI like the one you've linked to. But since it only seems to be a very shallow gui on top of the real less compiler, I don't think you'll have any problems using it directly. Type

    lessc --help

    to learn how to use it.

    If you want your .less files to be automatically compiled every time you change them, you can use the -w option:

    ~$ lessc test.less -w
* Watching for changes in test.less... Ctrl-C to abort.
: Change detected... * Updated test.css
: Change detected... * Updated test.css

    You can put this process in the background by pressing Ctrl+Z and typing bg, and start as many as you like. You can bring them back to the foreground by doing fg, or fg 3 for the third process, to get a list of all of the jobs and their numbers type jobs.

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  3. To my knowledge, ruby less isn't updated enough to even handle the concatenation operator.

    For those interested in a solution that compiles .less upon save for non mac platforms using less.js, you can check out this installation guide*. Though the tutorial is geared towards Windows users, I imagine if you can get Node.js on your system, the script itself will function the same.

    *Disclaimer: This tutorial is mine. Just thought people might want to see specifically what the poster above meant by "Use Node.js". I wasn't able to find any scripts online for using Node.js to compile LESS upon file save, so I cooked one up and thought I would share it.

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  4. Under Ubuntu 11.10, you can simply issue a

    sudo apt-get install lessc
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  5. you can install it the command line compiler in Ubuntu 12.10 as well:

    sudo apt-get install node-less
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  6. There's also http://koala-app.com/.

    http://crunchapp.net/ was my favorite, but we have to thank Adobe for discontinuing AIR for Linux.

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