Sass Tutorial - Installation and settings necessary to use Sass

Programming has a wide world, and many programmers are trying to add to their abilities in different fields of programming day by day. They try to use their knowledge to produce different programs in the  field of programming. There are several languages, among which we are going to mention CSS. You can master this language to produce many programs; when this language was introduced to users, it became so popular, and lots of people were attracted to it because it lets programmers use more features so that they can achieve their goals as soon as possible.

The reason for the introduction of Sass was to help programmers maintain more complex pages and use more features that we are going to cover in the following, but before that, we need to give you a brief overview of CSS.

What is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.

It describes how HTML elements should be displayed on various sites. For instance, if you think of HTML as the skeleton of a human body, CSS can be considered the flesh and skin that ultimately make up a human body.

It can be used to control the layout of multiple web pages at the same time, if CSS didn't exist, you cannot even imagine how ugly the web world would be, and users would be tired of navigating it and unwilling to spend long hours in it to get the answers they needed.

This language is so popular, and most programmers prefer to use it to do their tasks, so to provide programmers with more features, Sass is offered to them with the help of which they can write strong and maintainable CSS.

What is CSS used for?

It is generally used to define different styles for site pages, and all tasks such as page design, changes in their appearance, and adapting sites to display on different devices are done with the help of it.

The last case is important because it allows users to use any device to enter various sites. If the site can be only used on computers, users who want to enter it by mobile phone will have problems. They cannot use it easily because of the change in the size of everything compared to the computer. It is considered a negative point. Users will gain a negative experience from using your website, which causes them to prefer another website to find the answer to their questions. They will avoid using your site again. Also, they may share this negative experience with their friends, as a result of which the site traffic will gradually decrease, and the  site ranking on the search results page  will decrease as well, which will have a very bad effect on the site.

What is Sass?

Sass stands for  Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets. In simple terms, it is like an extension for CSS and works to allow you to use more features. With the help of Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets, it is possible for you to create style sheets very quickly and also helps you to be able to keep everything organized so that you can do all of them with installing it. Also, in addition to the positive points mentioned above, it has more positive points, one of which is of great importance is its compatibility with all versions of CSS.

The most direct way to make this happen is in your terminal. Once Sass is installed, you can compile your Sass to CSS by using its command. You will need to tell Sass which file to build from and where to output CSS to, for instance, running sass input.scss output.css from your terminal would take a single Sass file, input. scss, and compile that file to output.css.

It should also be noted that this feature is available for you to view all files and directories, and to do this, you need to use the watch flag if you want to create your input. scss file, you can only add the clock flag to your command, such as:

sass –watch input.scss output.cs, other features have been made available for you. For example, you can watch and output to directories by using folder paths as your input and output and separating them with a colon. Now consider this example:

sass –watch app/sass: public/stylesheets

In general, there are many cases and points in this regard that you should know, and among all of them, it is necessary to pay attention to the following topic.

Sass views all files in the app/sass folder for editing and compiles CSS in the public/stylesheet folder.

Here are some other things to do with Sass to work with more knowledge and mastery in the field of programming with the help of this.

One of the most important things in any programming language is the different variables that you can define in that language, or there are things in each one that you can use to do programming faster. In the following, we will mention some very important cases in this field.

Variables:

In this language, the $ symbol is being used to convert different items into one variable. Finally, it is possible for you as a programmer to save all the information you intend to use in your style sheet easily to do your task better. Now consider the following example for a better understanding.

Nesting:

One of the things that happens in some programming languages while writing code is that they have a clear and nested hierarchy that can help you significantly speed up the coding process. As you know, this ability does not exist in  CSS programming language, unlike HTML, and eventually, this issue may cause people to become more interested in HTML.

Finally, after the arrival of Sass, this problem has been solved because this possibility has been provided that you can place your CSS selectors in a way that follows a visual hierarchy the same as your HTML.

One thing you should not forget is that if you do not have the necessary mastery of each of the various features that exist in different programming languages, using those features not only cannot cause you to program more carefully but also it causes you to face more problems as well as bad results for using them in a wrong way, so it is necessary to practice and study various explanations and examples which have been mentioned in various articles to learn the various possibilities that are so necessary for you as a programmer, and then try to write a detailed program. As a result, you can finally achieve the desired result.

Now consider the following example in this regard:

Partials:

As mentioned earlier, Sass will allow you to handle various items easily. You can create partial Sass files containing small CSS pieces, which you can embed in other Sass files.

Using the @import command, you can add the partitions mentioned above to the code, which is done with the help of an HTTP Request, now consider the following example in this regard.

Mixins:

Writing different programs may seem tedious with some programming languages, so you need to get help from various available items to make it enjoyable for yourself. One of the things you can do is use  the Mixins feature, which you can use to create groups of CSS notifications that you want to reuse in your site, and you can also move different values as easily as possible.

Now consider the following example.

Extend / Inheritance:

One of the most important things in programming is that it ultimately allows different programmers to inherit styles from other selectors and receive styles from them. You can easily expand it wherever you

need it.

Consider the following example:

Operators:

Another thing that is very important for programmers is to perform various mathematical operations with the help of the available items easily. To understand this issue better, consider the example below where we're going to do some simple mathematical operations to calculate widths for an aside & article.

Install Sass:

So far, we have reviewed Sass to raise your awareness in this regard. Here we will teach you how you can install and finally use it with pleasure.

There are two ways to install it, which are:

- Using Applications

- Command Line

In the following, we will examine each of them separately.

Applications:

One of the ways to install is some programs that are available for free, and some others are paid. We are going to mention the different programs that exist, and as you can see, most of these programs are such that you need to pay a fee to use them.

-  CodeKit (Paid) Mac  - Ghostlab (Paid) Mac Windows

-  Hammer (Paid) Mac  - LiveReload (Paid, Open Source) Mac Windows

- Prepros (Paid) Mac Windows Linux

- Scout-App (Free, Open Source) Windows Linux Mac

Command Line:

There are several ways to install it, but we need to note that after you do it in any of the following ways, you will need to run Sass --version to make sure it is installed correctly. If so, this would include 1.35.1, after which you can safely use it to achieve your goals.

Install Anywhere (Standalone):

Through this way, you can use and finally install Sass on Windows, Mac, or Linux and enjoy using this by downloading the package for your operating system from GitHub and adding it to your PATH, this method is very simple, and you no longer need to install anything else on your system to complete the Sass installation process.

Install Anywhere (npm):

To install through this way, you need to download node.js first, and finally, after you have downloaded this item, you need to make sure that npm is installed with node.js, for this enter cmd or command line environment and type npm –v, and then press enter.

You should display the node version if it is installed, which indicates that node and npm are installed correctly on your system. You can install any package you want by using npm. When you are sure that this process is done, it is time to install the sass package. For doing this, you just need to enter the following command and then press enter.

npm install -g Sass

Here it is necessary to mention some points so that you can choose one of the different ways to install with more awareness, note that if you follow this way, you will eventually install the pure  JavaScript implementation of Sass, which runs somewhat slower than the other options which have been listed here. Still, it has the same interface, so it will be easy to swap in another implementation later if you need a bit more speed.

Install on Windows (Chocolatey):

If you use the Chocolatey package manager for Windows, you can install Dart Sass by running choco install sass.

Install on Mac OS X or Linux (Homebrew):

Using the Homebrew package manager for Mac OS X or Linux, you can install Dart Sass by running brew install sass/sass/sass. In general, there are several ways to install, from which you can choose one of them and finally enjoy the use of the sauce.

Last word:

In general, in this article, we tried to teach Sass, as well as the various ways to install it, and as you can see, you can do this process with the help of various free and paid software, for instance, by using the Command Line and lots of other ways which have been discussed in this regard so that you can program with more pleasure, accuracy and speed, and you can also use the available facilities in order to achieve your goals as soon as possible due to the fact that sometimes programming can turn into a boring activity which you have to spend a lot of time on it but if you try to use lots of abilities that programming languages provide for you, you can enjoy this activity by doing it faster and easier, these facilities can attract lots of people to  the world of programming, and they may be enthusiastic to be a programmer due to its features, we have also mentioned some important cases in  the field of programming  which you as a programmer should be aware of, in order to be able to  write a good program, we hope the content of the article has been useful for you, and you can take its advantage to achieve your desires in this field.