CSS, you know it you love it, or at least you should if you’ve been around since the days of designing with tables. But sometimes CSS can be a pain, and to help ease that pain we have LESS.
LESS is a CSS Preprocessor, its not a tool to make cool CSS effects, but rather a way to optimize your CSS workflow.
It allows you to add things like variables and math to your CSS. Letting you set a variable color then call that variable later on in your CSS. This is very useful when you have large CSS files and you want to change something down the road. If you have variables set up for your colors you can just change the colors in one place and they will then change throughout your site.
To use LESS you need to have something compile your LESS code into plain CSS. This can be done by setting up a Ruby on Rails environment and some gems, or if you’re on a mac you can use this great new product called Codekit. Its a mac app, (sorry windows users) that lets you easily convert your LESS code into regular CSS, all you have to do is tell Codekit where your LESS code is and where you want your CSS to go, then every time you save your LESS code, Codekit will compile to to CSS. Its pretty cool. Codekit does a lot of other neat stuff and I might write a post about it in the future.
** UPDATE **
For Windows users there is a new LESS compiler called Prepros that looks pretty good.