What is CSS preprocessor?

Nowadays, we often craft our styles by using preprocessors syntax. They provides a CSS-like syntax with enhanced features to save our time when building the web.

Preprocessing

We may get help from CSS Preprocessors. They enchance the CSS with a couple of handy features. Here are common features that preprocessors provides:

• variables
• functions (mixin)
• nested selectors

Tools

For the tools to compile the code into CSS, we need tool. Someone may favour command-line tool and some may favour GUI ones. Here are the GUIs.

• CodeKit (mac only)
• LiveReload (win and mac)

And here is the command-line tools.

• GruntJS
• GulpJS

Codepen

Codepen also provides both compiled CSS and SCSS in their editor.