Is anybody still using CSS transpilers (e.g. SASS or LESS) in 2026

[Dan Q]

I did a new project recently and briefly considered using SASS, because I wanted to create a lot of CSS selectors that were very-similar to one another, for which a loop would have been ideal. But in the end I just used plain old CSS.

I used to love SASS. The ability to "nest" elements and to have variables and color manipulation functions was enormous. But nowadays... all of those things (in some fashion or another) are available natively in CSS. Mixins would still be useful, I guess, but they're not a compelling enough reason to me to switch back to SASS.

CSS has moved on. Like how 20 years ago jQuery appeared to fill the "gaps" in JavaScript (selecting elements by CSS expression, event bubbling, Ajax etc.) but eventually JavaScript evolved to the point where you nobody needs jQuery any more... I think we might now be well into the period at which nobody needs SASS any more. I still use it in a few places (my blog theme uses it to compile lots of little stylesheets into one big one, for example). But I don't use it for new projects any more.

What about you? Are you still using SASS/LESS/etc.? Did you ever?

[ribose]

i didn't vote in your poll, because none of the answers feel quite like they describe my experience. i started actively learning CSS in late 2022, so i'm used to CSS being able to do a lot on its own. i mostly learned by searching for answers to specific questions, instead of following any structured courses or guides, and none what i read brought up CSS transpilers at all. i remember that my first encounter with SASS was on codepen, when i was looking up examples of how to do something (but i forget what it was exactly). i thought the CSS looked weird, pasted it into my stylesheet anyway, realized it didn't work at all, then went back to look closer at the codepen where i saw the code was labeled SASS instead of CSS. i looked up what SASS was, found a SASS to CSS tool to convert the code into something usable to me, then went on my way.

so i've never used CSS transpilers for my own sites, but i have used them! only once, and pretty recently! earlier this year i got into writing userstyles for myself, and then into writing more easily customizable versions to share with others (the stylus broswer extension provides a little menu for configuring variables that's more approachable to people who aren't interested in writing their own CSS). i had been finding it difficult to use status.cafe because the homepage shows statuses from every single user and a sizable fraction of them use the site to vent, be passive aggressive, or outright hostile. there's no built-in block or mute system, so i started hiding specific users with the following CSS:

Code

.status:has(a[href="/users/example"]) {
    display: none;
}

but every time i wanted to add a new user to the list, i had to add a new CSS selector. not too much of a pain for me, but what i really wanted for the shareable version of the userstyle was a way to add to the list of hidden users through the stylus configuration menu. reading the stylus docs for writing userCSS reintroduced me to the idea of CSS preprocessors, and that i could write loops! i went with stylus (the preprocessor) over uso or less, maybe just because the name matched the browser extension name?
all this resulted in my status.cafe userstyle, which has variables defined as:

Code

@var text hiddenUsers "Hidden Users" "example example2"

with the following loop:

Code

for user in hiddenUsers
    .status:has(a[href=\"\/users\/{user}\"])
        display: none;

it works exactly as i had hoped! anyone using the style(+ extension) can just type in a list of usernames separated by spaces and any statuses from those users will be instantly hidden.

that's my only experience using CSS preprocessors so far, but i expect that i'll find more uses for them in future userstyles!

[Cyan]

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I too loved SASS and would use it for everything. So now I have many legacy projects (including at work) that use SASS, and I see no need to rebuild perfectly functional sites just for that. But I don't add it to new projects.

No shade on SASS, I still like it, but it's nice not having to rely on external tooling. Maybe it's a sign I'm getting old, but I am so endlessly tired of dependencies and frameworks and all that jazz... Just let me use vanilla CSS and vanilla Javascript and leave me alone haha 😅