CSS Formatter

The CSS Formatter turns minified or messy stylesheets into clean, readable code with each selector on its own line and every declaration indented beneath it. Instead of hunting through a compressed blob for the rule you want to change, you get a tidy layout where selectors, properties and values are all easy to scan and edit.

It is built for front-end developers picking apart a minified stylesheet, designers tweaking exported CSS, and anyone who needs to understand or modify styles they did not write. When every property sits on its own line, spotting a duplicated declaration, a typo in a value or a rule that never closes becomes straightforward rather than tedious.

Everything runs locally in your browser using JavaScript, so the CSS you paste is never uploaded, logged or stored. That keeps proprietary design systems, unreleased styles and any private markup entirely on your own device while you format it.

Features

• Places each selector block on its own line with an opening brace for clear separation.
• Puts every property and value on its own indented line for easy reading and editing.
• Normalises spacing so there is a single space after each colon between property and value.
• Strips existing comments and inconsistent whitespace before rebuilding a clean layout.
• Handles nested at-rules such as media queries by indenting their inner rules correctly.
• Offers two-space, four-space or tab indentation to match your project's style.
• Copies the formatted stylesheet or downloads it as a file for your editor.

How to use CSS Formatter

1. Paste your CSS, whether minified or inconsistently spaced, into the input box.
2. Choose two spaces, four spaces or a tab for each level of indentation.
3. Read the formatted stylesheet, with one selector per block and one declaration per line.
4. Scan the declarations to find duplicates, typos or rules you want to change.
5. Copy the tidied CSS or download it as a file to use in your project.

Benefits

• Developers read and edit minified stylesheets that would otherwise be a single dense line.
• One property per line makes duplicated or conflicting declarations easy to spot.
• Consistent formatting keeps stylesheets tidy and version-control diffs meaningful.
• Designers inspect exported CSS from a tool or framework in a readable form.
• Understanding an unfamiliar stylesheet is faster when its structure is laid out clearly.
• Because formatting is local, proprietary design tokens in your CSS never leave your device.

Readable CSS makes maintenance safer. When declarations are stacked one per line, you can see at a glance that a colour is set twice, that a shorthand and a longhand property are fighting each other, or that a media query wraps more rules than you expected. That visibility is hard to achieve in a minified file where everything is jammed onto one line.

The formatter strips comments and collapses the original whitespace before rebuilding the layout from scratch, which means it produces a consistent result regardless of how the input was spaced. It adds a single space after each colon in a declaration and indents the contents of each rule, including rules nested inside at-rules such as media and supports queries, so the whole stylesheet reads as a clean hierarchy.

This is a formatting aid rather than a CSS validator, so it lays out whatever you give it without checking that properties or values are valid. It focuses on the structural punctuation of CSS, which is braces, semicolons and colons, so everyday stylesheets format cleanly; extremely unusual constructs are still laid out, just without any special-case handling beyond that core structure.