Styling

If you ever end up writing your own CSS, it's worth to know several things.

Mobile first approach

We try to write frontend code for mobile and then use media queries for bigger breakpoints. You can read more about it in Responsiveness section.

SCSS

We use SCSS as a CSS preprocessor. So you can use all the magic that SCSS offers.

CSS Variables

Even though we use SCSS, we prefer to use native CSS variables because they are more flexible. You should be able to view all variables we have in app/assets/stylesheets/config/_variables.scss file. Since this file is imported everywhere, you should not need to import that by your own.

Fun fact: there's one exception to that: responsiveness breakpoints. Since you can't use a CSS variables when defining a media query, this is the only case when we use SCSS variables. It's just easier.

Themes

Forem support multiple themes so you should always test your work against all themes. We have a file with all color variables and each theme has its own too.

Default theme: app/assets/stylesheets/config/_colors.scss
Other themes (minimal, night, pink, hacker): app/assets/stylesheets/themes

Import.scss

When you create a new SCSS file you may want to import one file at the top of your new file: app/assets/stylesheets/config/_import.scss - it contains some helpers as well as breakpoint variables I mentioned earlier.

Folders

You can access all of the SCSS files in app/assets/stylesheets folder.

/base - this folder contains some fundamental styling for layouts, resets and icons.
/components - this folder contains separate SCSS file for each component we have... tags, buttons, forms, ...
/config - this folder contains bunch of configuration files. These are worth explaining:
- _colors.scss - I mentioned it couple lines above - it contains all color variables used in Crayons.
- _generator.scss - it's basically a huge SCSS mixin generating ALL our utility classes.
- _import.scss - it contains bunch of helpers for SCSS as well as media breakpoints variables.
- _variables.scss - it contains all CSS native variables.
/themes - this folder contains color declarations for other themes.
Other folders and top level files are mostly legacy... :) We still use them, but slowly trying to move all the styling to appropriate Crayons-related files. Exceptions:
- crayons.scss - this is one importing everything Crayons-related like variables, components styling, utility classes etc.
- minimal.scss - this one is actually one of the main stylesheets from pre-Crayons era. It imports everything basically :).

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