LESS CSS

Because of my current sort of trip out of my programming comfort zone, I decided for Quiky web app to try something I read a lot about recently - CSS preprocessors. From the triumvirate of most popular ones I chose LESS, because I saw it around me the most.

I installed a plugin for PHPStorm (built-in wasn't working for me), called LESS CSS Compiler. As I would expect, it compiles CSS from LESS source on each save. It requires setup of profiles, specifying where to search for LESS and where to put CSS, which is unerstable, but I'm keeping both in the same dir and because each app has it's own LESS/CSS, it turns to be quite annoying, because I have to do the setup again each time I try to make a new app.

LESS Profiles in PHPStorm's Settings

LESS works for me really well, I can say I'm happy to start with that. So if you hesitate, like I did, don't worry. It will open many new opportunities.

If you create more projects based on the same HTML structure, or you are just not sure about if shades are right, you can define variables for colors and it will definitely saves you more time time than it takes to make it work.