About the CSS Formatter
What is a CSS formatter?
A CSS formatter takes messy, minified, or inconsistently written stylesheets and rewrites them cleanly — one declaration per line, tidy property: value spacing, and consistent indentation that follows the nesting of your @media and other at-rules. This one works live: paste CSS into the left editor and the beautified result appears on the right as you type, with syntax highlighting on both sides.
It also runs in reverse. Switch the mode to Minify and the same stylesheet is compressed for production: comments stripped, whitespace collapsed, and trailing semicolons removed — while strings, url(data:...) values, and calc() expressions are left untouched, because the minifier actually understands CSS structure rather than blindly deleting spaces. Everything happens in your browser with no libraries fetched from a CDN, so it's fast, private, and works offline.
How to Use This Tool
- Add your CSS. Paste it into the left editor, click Open file, or hit Sample to see it in action.
- Watch it format. The output updates live — no button to press. A badge warns you if your braces don't balance.
- Pick your style. Choose 2 spaces, 4 spaces, or tabs for indentation, or flip the mode to Minify for a production build.
- Take the result. Copy it to your clipboard or download it as a
.cssfile. The size chips show exactly how much you saved.
Common Use Cases
- Reading minified CSS: Expand a production stylesheet into readable code to debug a live site.
- Cleaning up legacy styles: Normalize inconsistent indentation and spacing across an old codebase.
- Shipping smaller files: Minify hand-written CSS before deploying, and see the size reduction instantly.
- Preparing code for review: Format snippets consistently before pasting them into a PR, article, or Stack Overflow answer.
- Learning from other sites: Beautify CSS copied from DevTools into something you can actually study.
Comparing two stylesheets instead? Use the CSS Compare tool, check your syntax with the CSS Validator, or browse all our free developer tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does formatting change how my CSS behaves?
No. Beautifying only changes whitespace, line breaks, and indentation; minifying additionally strips comments and redundant characters. Selectors, properties, and values are preserved exactly, so the browser renders the same styles either way.
Can it handle minified or single-line CSS?
Yes, that is the main job. A whole stylesheet on one line expands into cleanly indented rules, including nested @media and @supports blocks.
Is the minifier safe for strings and data URIs?
Yes. The minifier is structure-aware: quoted strings keep their internal spacing, semicolons inside url(data:...) values are never treated as separators, and calc() expressions keep the spaces their operators require.
What does the braces badge mean?
The tool counts opening and closing braces as you type, ignoring braces inside strings and comments. An "Unbalanced braces" warning almost always means a truncated paste or a missing bracket, which is worth fixing since it affects everything below it.
Will it work with SCSS or LESS?
Mostly, yes. Since both are brace-based supersets of CSS, nesting indents correctly and minification is generally safe, though preprocessor-specific one-liners like mixins are formatted as plain rules.
Is my code uploaded anywhere?
No. Formatting runs entirely in your browser with self-contained JavaScript — no CDN, no server round trips, no logging. It even works offline once the page has loaded.