The next version of Sass recently hit release candidate status, meaning it’ll be out in the wild any day now. There are some great changes coming in Sass 3.3, one of which should have developers extremely excited: sourcemaps.
Put plainly, sourcemaps are a way to map compiled code back to its native state. That may sound kind of odd, but sourcemaps will make every Sass-loving developer’s life a little bit better. Browsers that understand the generated map file will know where each and every line of code came from, down to the line number in the original Sass file, rather than the line number from the compiled CSS file.
Even in the pre-release state, sourcemaps are proving to be a big productivity boost for developers by cutting down debug time and making Sass code easier to optimize and improve. No need to wait for Sass 3.3 to be released officially: install the release candidate and try it out in your own projects!
Woohoo! I need this in my life. Does this work no matter what style of CSS is output (compressed/expanded/etc)?
No more editing my config.rb file, ever!
I love Chrome’s Dev tool (more than Firebug) but I’ve been using FireSass for Sass debugging. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firesass-for-firebug/.
@Sang-Min it was possible before to use Google Dev Tools with Sass sourcemaps w/o any extension. You just had to use Sass3.3 alpha and it worked like a charm.
@Cat: Yep! All it does is generate a {filename}.css.map file alongside the rendered {filename}.css file. In the header of the CSS file, there is a comment directing browsers where to look for the sourcemap file.
@Sang-Min: Awesome, hadn’t seen that! Looks great for Firefox users.
Yes definitely a feature of LESS that I’m looking forward to using in SASS now! 😀