Recently, I gave up on using Eclipse in favor of NetBeans.  I had also considered Visual Studio for my Windows machine, but NetBeans was easy to setup a project that did not get in the way of the folder hierarchy and worked well with my local WAMP setup.

As I started to develop a WordPress-friendly way of compiling LESS files on refresh, NetBeans prompted me with this:

article-netbeansless

Wow – that is awesome.  LESS files were already color-coded and there was already a way to compile built directly into NetBeans.  Of course, I hit yes and found out that I needed to supply the IDE with a compiler.  After a bit of searching, I found this one:

https://github.com/duncansmart/less.js-windows

It takes about one minute to compile after a save.  The .less.cache and .css files only show up in your deployed folder – so no adding unnecessary files to source control!

Alternatively, if you are using something like Eclipse, you can read up on an earlier article here: https://dansuleski.com/using-less-in-eclipse/.

And if you are using some other IDE altogether, there is a cool app called SimpLESS found here: http://wearekiss.com/simpless.

 

NOTE: When you download less.js-windows, you must first run build.cmd.  This will download another ZIP that looks very similar to what you originally downloaded, but will actually contain bin/node.js, which is the file/location that lessc.cmd expects.  Really weird process??