How It Works

This tool reads your CSS as plain text and applies formatting rules that improve readability without changing the meaning of your styles. It inserts line breaks after selectors and declarations, aligns braces in a consistent way, and indents nested blocks such as @media, @supports, and keyframe steps. The goal is not to “rewrite” your CSS, but to present it in a predictable structure that makes scanning and editing easy.

What you control

• Indentation: Choose common indentation widths (2 spaces, 4 spaces) or tabs to match your project conventions.
• Newline style: Output with LF or CRLF line endings depending on your OS, editor, or repository policy.
• Brace style: Keep braces on the same line as selectors (end-of-line) or move opening braces to the next line for a more “vertical” look.
• Comments: Decide whether block comments should be preserved in place or removed when you only want the structural layout.

Formatting is also a teaching tool. When juniors learn CSS, a well-structured stylesheet demonstrates best practices: grouping related declarations, ordering rules, and isolating responsive overrides. Even experienced developers benefit because a consistent layout reduces cognitive load—you spend less time deciphering where a block ends and more time thinking about design decisions.

If you use preprocessors such as Sass or Less, a formatter still helps when you copy compiled output into a bug report or need to compare generated CSS across builds. Clean formatting makes it easier to identify which selector changed and which declaration introduced an unexpected cascade.

After you submit, the formatted CSS appears in the Result panel where you can copy it to the clipboard, download it as a .css file, or reset the form to start over.

Key Features

Consistent indentation and spacing

Readable CSS depends on predictable whitespace. The formatter normalizes indentation across selectors and declarations, making it easy to spot where blocks begin and end. This is especially helpful when working with multi-line selectors, long property values, and nested at-rules.

Improved diff quality in version control

When a team uses the same formatting conventions, git diffs become smaller and more meaningful. Instead of noisy whitespace changes scattered across a file, you’ll see focused edits that reflect real styling changes. That helps reviewers move faster and reduces the risk of missing an important change.

Cleaner debugging and faster maintenance

Well-formatted CSS is easier to debug in a browser’s DevTools because you can quickly locate the relevant selector and identify overrides. A consistent layout also makes maintenance faster: you can safely refactor declarations, extract shared rules, and reorganize sections without fighting inconsistent formatting.

Supports common CSS structures

Modern CSS includes more than just selectors and declarations. The tool formats nested blocks such as @media queries, @supports rules, and keyframes so the hierarchy is visually clear. This is essential for responsive and component-driven stylesheets where nesting is common.

Readable long values and modern functions

Today’s CSS often contains complex values: multiple gradients, clamp() expressions, color functions, and long font stacks. When whitespace is inconsistent, these values become difficult to edit safely. Formatting provides stable line breaks around declarations so you can focus on the value itself, not the surrounding punctuation.

Better collaboration between design and development

Design systems often involve designers, front-end developers, and sometimes content teams. A clean stylesheet is easier for non-specialists to scan when they need to confirm token usage, spacing values, or component states. When everyone can read the file, feedback loops shorten and decisions become clearer.

Copy, download, and reset workflow

After formatting, you can copy the output in one click or download the result as a file for quick integration into your project. The reset button restores the default example and options, which is useful when demonstrating formatting rules to teammates or testing how different settings affect output.

Use Cases

• Beautify minified CSS: Convert compressed build output into readable form when you need to inspect or debug it.
• Normalize third-party snippets: Paste styles from documentation, Stack Overflow, or component libraries and format them to match your codebase.
• Prepare styles for code review: Format a stylesheet before opening a pull request so reviewers focus on logic rather than layout.
• Clean up legacy files: Bring older stylesheets up to a modern, consistent format without rewriting selectors.
• Improve onboarding: New contributors understand a stylesheet faster when structure, nesting, and declarations follow a consistent pattern.
• Audit responsive rules: Make @media sections easier to scan so you can compare breakpoints and spot redundant declarations.
• Refactor safely: A clean layout makes it easier to extract common patterns, remove duplicates, and reorganize sections by feature.

Beyond the common scenarios, formatting is useful for operational tasks: creating reproducible bug reports, sharing minimal examples, and documenting hotfixes. If you need to paste CSS into an issue tracker or chat, formatted rules are dramatically easier for others to follow. It also helps when you split a large stylesheet into modules—consistent indentation makes it obvious which blocks should move together.

For performance-focused teams, a beautifier can be the companion to minification. You might ship minified assets to users, but keep formatted sources in your repository for clarity. When troubleshooting production issues, it’s common to temporarily prettify compiled CSS to identify where a rule originated. A dependable formatter speeds up that process.

In practice, a formatter becomes part of a healthy CSS workflow: you can use it ad hoc for quick cleanups, or as a reference for establishing formatting conventions that align with your editor configuration and linting rules.

Optimization Tips

Pick one indentation rule and stick to it

Choose 2 spaces, 4 spaces, or tabs—then keep it consistent across the project. Consistency reduces merge conflicts and makes scanning faster. If your repository enforces EditorConfig settings, match the formatter options to avoid toggling indentation styles back and forth.

Use brace style to improve scanability

End-of-line braces keep selectors compact and are common in front-end codebases. Next-line braces can make large selectors easier to see because the block boundary is more prominent. Try both on a representative file and choose the style that your team reads fastest.

Preserve comments when documenting intent

Comments often explain why a workaround exists, which browsers it targets, or how a particular section relates to a component. Preserve comments when your CSS contains valuable context. If you’re formatting temporary output for quick inspection, you can disable comment preservation to emphasize structure.

Combine formatting with a linting strategy

Formatting improves readability, while linting enforces correctness and style rules. Consider pairing formatted output with a CSS linter (for example, to prevent duplicate properties or discourage overly specific selectors). When formatting and linting agree, your stylesheet stays both clean and robust as it evolves.

FAQ