When comparing Stylus vs Momentum, the Slant community recommends Momentum for most people. In the question“What are the best Chrome add-ons?” Momentum is ranked 19th while Stylus is ranked 24th. The most important reason people chose Momentum is:
Momentum has a different, beautiful background image each day. It displays the time, a welcoming message and a reminder in the middle of the page and hides all other functionality out of focus.
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Pros
Pro Clean syntax
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.
Pro Powerful feature set
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
Pro Transparent mixins
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.
Pro Easy to integrate in projects already using npm
Stylus runs on node.js which makes it very easy to integrate into your project if you're using npm.
Pro Powerful @extend support
@extend gives inheritance and unlike for other preprocessors, you can pass any CSS selector, not just classes.
Pro Awesome error reporting
Stylus has clear and detailed error reporting that includes stack traces and line numbers.
Pro Lots of mixin libraries
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.
Pro Convert files to base64
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
Pro Easier to learn than some of its competitors
Pro Can do rgba(#hex, alpha)
Pro Great documentation
Pro Large set of built-in functions
Functions like max(), min(), sum(), all collour handling functions are all there.
Pro It has the biggest feature set. Can do more then less or sass
Pro Beautiful design
Momentum has a different, beautiful background image each day. It displays the time, a welcoming message and a reminder in the middle of the page and hides all other functionality out of focus.
Pro Provides with weather information
Current temperature and weather conditions are shown in the top-right corner.
Pro Built-in to-do list
Momentum has a simple to-do list that can be accessed from the bottom-right corner of the page.
Pro Reminds of the day's goal
Momentum asks the user what's the focus of the day and then shows that information is each time a new tab is opened.
Pro Inspirational quote
Momentum shows you a new inspirational quote, once a day.
Pro Displays bookmarks nicely
It shows your bookmarks and most frecent sites in a really nice way
Cons
Con Not under active development
Development of stylus has stagnated, there are lots of known bugs and it does not work well newer features like CSS Grid or custom poperties. See https://github.com/stylus/stylus/issues
Con Community is weak, feels more like a pet project
Con Ambiguous syntax
The Stylus syntax is very loose and that leads to ambiguity where some definitions can mean different things. For example, hashed objects cannot be used when you choose to omit colons in your definitions, because the dot notated object getters could also be a nested class selector. As a result, you lose being able to use hashed object getters if you decided to write Stylus without colons.
Con Not as popular as Less and Sass
Stylus is younger than both Less and Sass, and not yet at the same level of popularity. As a result, Stylus currently has a smaller and less active community than the two more popular options.
Con Inconsistent style/flavour in different projects
Due to having such a loose syntax, the coding style can vary between different Stylus projects, making it hard to apply styles from other projects that use a different syntax style — at least if you care for consistency.
Con Heavily reliant on whitespaces
Stylus relies heavily on whitespaces to separate and define code blocks. While this makes for a cleaner syntax, it's also easier to make mistakes when indenting stuff, especially when working with someone else's code where you don't use the same style of indentation.
Con Some basic features not free
It costs to use features like changing the background manually.
Con Can't add bookmarks
You can't add bookmarks to it
Con Can't be customized
There are no customization options. Existing items can't be turned off.
Con 4K images not available
When accessed from a 4K display, the images will be bad quality.