How Sass Can Save You a Lot of Time

Sass is a CSS preprocessor that solves a lot of the problems with writing CSS and can be extremely useful to incorporate in your projects. I’ll explain what CSS preprocessors are, how you can install Sass, the 2 different Sass syntaxes, some of the main features of Sass and finish off with some cool examples.

CSS Preprocessors

CSS preprocessors allow us to use certain features that aren’t currently available in CSS. The CSS specification is slowly adopting features that are currently available in preprocessors (such as variables), but it still has a long way to go to catch up to preprocessors. CSS preprocessors allow you to cut the lines of code necessary for writing your CSS and it also allows you to make changes more quickly since you don’t have to change repeated instances of CSS.

Sass is one of the most popular CSS preprocessors out there and it is widely used in a lot of applications. Sass works by writing your styles in .scss (or .sass) files, which will then get compiled into a regular CSS file. The newly compiled CSS file is what gets loaded to your browser to style your web application. This allows the browser to properly apply the styles to your web page.

Sass stands for Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets

Of course, Sass is not the only option when it comes to preprocessors. Two other popular options are Less and Stylus, which come with their own set of features and syntax.

Installing and Running Sass

You can install Sass right from your terminal/command prompt. You will need to have Ruby installed on your machine in order to install Sass (comes pre-installed on Macs). Once you’ve got Ruby installed on your machine, you can run the following command to install Sass:

sudo gem install Sass

Read more about installing Sass on the Sass website.

There are many tools used to help compile your Sass into CSS in your projects. For example, Node.js works well with build tools such as Grunt and Gulp, which have ways to compile your Sass files. Using Grunt or Gulp allows you to specify which files to watch for changes, allowing your Sass files to be automatically compiled to CSS every time you modify and save a Sass file.

Sass Syntaxes

Sass has two syntaxes: Sass and Scss (AKA Sassy Sass). Scss is the newer syntax and it is an extension of the CSS syntax. This means that every valid CSS file is also a valid Scss file. The older Sass syntax uses indentation instead of brackets to nest selectors and it does not use semicolons. The older Sass syntax is not an extension of CSS.

There are pros and cons to both syntaxes, as explained here. I prefer the newer syntax because it is easier to convert CSS files into Sass files with the newer syntax since all CSS is valid Scss. All the examples to follow will be using the Scss syntax.

One easy way to familiarize yourself with Sass syntax is through CodePen, since their Pens allow you to use CSS preprocessors. You can also play around online with Sass here to see how it looks like when compiled to CSS.

Main Sass Features

The main features that are included in Sass are variables, nesting, partials, imports, mixins, inheritance, and operators.

Variables

You’re able to store reusable values inside of Sass variables, such as font colors, font stacks, or border-radius values. Create variables by prepending the $ symbol to a word of your choice. This is great when working with brand colors throughout a website.

Nesting

Nesting your CSS selectors in Sass allows you to follow the same visual hierarchy of HTML when targeting the elements you want to style. Nesting your selectors improves readability, but try not to go too many levels deep since it can “over-qualify” your CSS and make your code harder to maintain. If you’re going more than 3 levels deep with your nesting, you may want to consider refactoring your code and adding classes inside of your HTML to better target your elements.

Partials

Partials allow you to modularize your Sass. Partials are files that contain Sass snippets to be included in other Sass files. Sass partials are included in other files using the @import directive (explained next). Partial files are named with a leading _ such as _button.scss or _carousel.scss.

Partials are a great way to organize your Sass and can save you lots of time trying to find the correct styles to modify. This is especially true if you follow a good file architecture. One pattern I like to follow for my files and folders is the 7–1 pattern introduced by Hugo Giraudel.

sass/
|
|– abstracts/
|   |– _variables.scss    # Sass Variables
|   |– _functions.scss    # Sass Functions
|   |– _mixins.scss       # Sass Mixins
|   |– _placeholders.scss # Sass Placeholders
|
|– base/
|   |– _reset.scss        # Reset/normalize
|   |– _typography.scss   # Typography rules
|   …                     # Etc.
|
|– components/
|   |– _buttons.scss      # Buttons
|   |– _carousel.scss     # Carousel
|   |– _cover.scss        # Cover
|   |– _dropdown.scss     # Dropdown
|   …                     # Etc.
|
|– layout/
|   |– _navigation.scss   # Navigation
|   |– _grid.scss         # Grid system
|   |– _header.scss       # Header
|   |– _footer.scss       # Footer
|   |– _sidebar.scss      # Sidebar
|   |– _forms.scss        # Forms
|   …                     # Etc.
|
|– pages/
|   |– _home.scss         # Home specific styles
|   |– _contact.scss      # Contact specific styles
|   …                     # Etc.
|
|– themes/
|   |– _theme.scss        # Default theme
|   |– _admin.scss        # Admin theme
|   …                     # Etc.
|
|– vendors/
|   |– _bootstrap.scss    # Bootstrap
|   |– _jquery-ui.scss    # jQuery UI
|   …                     # Etc.
|
`– main.scss              # Main Sass file

Imports

CSS currently allows you to use @import to include other CSS files in another main CSS file. The downside of this is that it requires an additional HTTP request for each import statement, which negatively affects your web page performance.

Sass improves upon this @import directive by combining your Sass files prior to compiling your CSS. This allows you to output a single CSS file that will be served to the browser (i.e. one HTTP request).

Let’s say you want to import two partials (_header.scss and _footer.scss) into another file called base.scss(assuming they are both in the same folder). Here’s how that would like like:

And your compiled CSS file would be the following:

Mixins

Mixins allow you to make groups of reusable CSS declarations which the option of passing in arguments. When calling a mixin, you must use the @include statement followed by the name of the mixin. A popular use of mixins is for vendor prefixes.

Extend/Inheritance

You’re able to share CSS properties from one selector to another using @extend and it helps to reduce repetition in your code.

Operators

The ability to do math in your CSS can be extremely beneficial and Sass includes the standard math operators +, -, *, /, and % that can be used in your code.

Cool Examples

Here are four examples that demonstrate some of Sass’s features.

Updating Color Variables

This first example uses Sass variables to store the values for both the primary and secondary colors used in the application. The color variables are used all throughout the Sass file so changes to both those variables will result in changes to the styling of many elements on the page.

Sass Dropdowns

This example uses Sass variables, nesting, inheritance, and operators. Variables are used to capture color values, dimensions used for the dropdown triangles, animation values, and a standard border radius value. Inheritance is used to apply a clearfix to floated element containers. Operators are used to calculate the size of the dropdown triangles.

There are some Sass features used in this example that I did not cover above, such as the & selector. The & selector is used when referencing a parent selector. It is often used when applying styles to the hovered state of an element.

Sass Waves

This example uses variables, operators, and a Sass “for” loop. The “for” loop is another feature I did not introduce above, but it is used in this example to calculate the animation of each dot in the application. This particular “for” loop saves us a lot of typing and calculations. If you look at the lines of code in the compiled CSS for this particular application, it comes out to be 121 lines of code (versus 55 lines of code using Sass).

Sass Media Queries

This final example illustrates how useful Sass mixins can be. It uses a mixin to set properties and values on selectors at specified screen widths. Depending on your browser’s width, the elements on the page will have different properties and values applied to them.

I hope this article encourages some people to start using a CSS preprocessor, like Sass, in their front end development workflow. I’ve really enjoyed using it and I’m always learning about more cool thinks you can do with Sass.

---

How Sass Can Save You a Lot of Time was originally published in codeburst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.