Summary

Working with Less can be very rewarding when you have the right tools installed and available for use in your workflow. We started with a look at some of the editors that are available; these include support for Less, such as Sublime Text or Notepad++. We then moved on to installing Sublime Text 2 and added support for Less.

Next up came a discussion on the options available for compiling Less code—the first option covered how you can use a standalone compiler such as WinLess to produce the final CSS code; we took a look at each of the main compilers available, and followed it by installing Crunch!.

We then moved on to examining how you can use the command line to compile the code—we looked at how using a standalone compiler meant adding another layer into your development workflow, which isn't ideal. We ran through a basic installation of Node.js, which we then first configured to compile Less files before adding an automatic watch facility and finishing with a look at how you can link this to editors such as Notepad++.

We then rounded off the chapter with a look at the options available for debugging code in browsers. We examined how FireLESS and Firebug make this a cinch when using Firefox, while it requires a little more work to configure Chrome (and Opera) in order to use source maps to achieve the same effect. We also covered some of the other tools you might find useful for developing with Less, such as LESS2CSS or Adobe Kuler.

In the next chapter, we're going to really get stuck in and start to produce valid Less code. We'll take a look at downloading and adding Less and start to examine its syntax before writing some styles and seeing the results from compiling using the command line or through a standalone compiler.