There’s been a buzz around the web development community recently about this tool call Less, for CSS development. I saw the links, checked it out, and pretty much the first thing I saw was the big fat Ruby icon on the web site and thought to myself, “meh, its a Ruby tool…not for me”.

We were back in Dayton this weekend and got a chance to catch up with a bunch of friends we hadn’t seen in a while, and Ben was showing me some of the work he was doing with Less. I said to him, “I thought you were doing ColdFusion development…how is it that you’re using Less…I thought it was a Ruby on Rails tool?” He corrected me. Its a tool that runs on top of the Ruby language, that parses “less” files and spits out CSS files. So you just write a .less file, run Less against it, and it generates a CSS file that you use in your web site. Oh wow I thought…COOL!

So I decided to see if I could get it to work on Windows (he does his web development on a Mac). Turns out, it was much more simple than I thought it would be…

I did a Google search for Ruby on Windows, and it took me to RubyForge where I found a link to download the Ruby One-Click Installer for Windows. Downloaded and ran it. Ruby was installed in about four minutes (it actually took a LONG time to run, longer than I expected), and then it was done.

Then, based on the documentation on the front page of the Less web site, I opened up a command line, and typed in “gem install less”, and 30 seconds later, Less was installed. I was immediately able to create a .less file and generate a CSS file from it. Nice! Pretty sweet little tool for writing CSS, I’m very impressed with it so far.