Stylus vs Rework

Stylus has an extremely terse syntax. Colons, semicons and braces are all optional allowing you to write Stylus code however you want.

hover-darken(percent)
  if @background
    &:hover
      background: darken(@background, percent)

.test
  background: blue
  hover-darken(50%)

The hierarchy is required to be whitespace indented which makes it easier to identify which parent selectors child selectors belong to.

Not only does Stylus support all the features from Less and Sass, it provides features not found anywhere else:

• You can get properties from parents and pull them into children and/or mixins - if the property isn't found, it will bubble up until it finds a match
• Introspective API, where a CSS block can tell if it’s at root level or not and change its output based on this
• Splats - taking variable amount of arguments in as an array
• Automatically vendor prefixes @keyframes
• Pass a CSS literal block wherever you want
• Convert files to base64

One of Stylus' distinguishing features is transparent mixins: reusuable, possibly dynamic styles that look exactly like native CSS properties. This is particularly useful for using future non-prefixed properties and having them transparently expand to their prefixed counterparts without any special, preprocessor-specific syntax.

Stylus runs on node.js which makes it very easy to integrate into your project if you're using npm.

@extend gives inheritance and unlike for other preprocessors, you can pass any CSS selector, not just classes.

Stylus has clear and detailed error reporting that includes stack traces and line numbers.

Nib is Stylus's answer to Compass, but with the advantage of transparent mixins.

Ride css add dozens of useful mixins to Stylus. Compatible with axis, nib and other mixins libraries.

Roots is a awesome toolkit that contains a CSS library for Stylus that provides the benefits of Nib and more. It is essentially a collection of mixins that add a variety of enhancements to the Stylus workflow.

Stylus can also convert files to base64 which provides the following advantages:

• Easier to maintain
• Gives you the cleanliness of a URL link resource as well the benefits of base64 encoding
• Reducing the number of requests

Functions like max(), min(), sum(), all collour handling functions are all there.

Through transforms you can modify existing properties to give them new attributes and options, so instead of managing messy mixins, you can add a simple new attribute where they make the most sense.

Because Rework plugins are done in code, there are no limits to what they can do, and they tend to provide more advanced functionality that would be harder to implement in other preprocessors, such as file I/O and custom logic.

Rework isn't a language for compiling to CSS but rather a library around parsing it and transforming it. For example, a vendor prefix plugin will inject prefixes around needed properties so you don't have to muddy up your CSS dealing with it.

Because Rework is built around plugins at its core, it makes for easier plugin writing if you find you want to add in new functionality.

Although you don't have to, since Rework works on vanilla CSS, you could use another preprocessor that has a syntax you enjoy more before applying Rework's transforms.

Rework plugins can recognize custom properties and transform them via plugins. This allows you to keep your CSS clean and expand its functionality in a native feeling way, without having to learn a bunch of new language constructs.