Aside from the usual techniques (e.g. whitespace removal, color minification, etc.), the idea was to explore new possibilities, by implementing things other minifiers weren't doing, or they were, but not taking full advantage of.
Also, the minifier implements some techniques that do nothing for minified sizes, but attempt to improve post-compression sizes (at least when using DEFLATE, i.e. gzip).
For a list of techniques, see the wiki. To use it as a library, see below.
The easiest and prefered way is using stack. To directly install, use the following one-liner:
git clone git@github.com:contivero/hasmin.git && cd hasmin && stack installStack installs inside ~/.local/bin by default. If you'd rather just try hasmin
out, replace install by build, and then use stack exec hasmin from inside
the hasmin directory (keep in mind it has a slight additional delay at the
beginning when run this way).
Alternatively, you can use cabal:
$ cd path/to/hasmin/repo
$ cabal update # Make sure to have the latest package list
$ cabal sandbox init # Initialise a sandbox
$ cabal install --only-dependencies # Install dependencies into the sandbox
$ cabal build # Build hasmin inside the sandboxHasmin expects a path to the CSS file, and outputs the minified result to
stdout. Say you have a sheet.css and want to minify it, and save it as
sheet.min.css. Then, run:
$ hasmin sheet.css > sheet.min.cssEvery technique is enabled by default, except for:
- Escaped character conversions (e.g. converting
\2714into✔, enabled with--convert-escaped-characters). - Dimension minifications (e.g. converting
12pxto9pt, enabled with--dimension-min, or just-d). - Lexicographical sorting of declarations (enabled with
--sort-declarations).
The first two are disabled mainly because they are—on average, not always—detrimental for DEFLATE compression. As for declaration sorting, whether it benefits or hurts compression rates is very stylesheet-dependent, and the current implementation is quite naive, hence unsafe.
When something needs to be disabled, use the appropriate flag. Not every technique can be toggled, but if there is any one in particular that you need to and can't, open an issue about it.
Note: there is a problem in Windows when using the
--convert-escaped-characters flag to enable the conversion of escaped
characters. A workaround is changing the code page, which can be done by running
chcp 65001 in the terminal (whether cmd, or cygwin).
The preferable way to use Hasmin as a library is to import Hasmin; a usage
example can be seen in the module's documentation.
That is currently the only module that is sure to abide by
PVP. Most other exposed modules are so because tests
need it, and thus definitions there may be changed anytime. In case something
internal is needed though, feel free to open an issue about it.
Hasmin uses bindings to Google's Zopfli library, allowing the possibility to compress the result.
Since the output is a gzip file, it can be used for the web. It tipically produces files 3~8% smaller than zlib, at the cost of being around 80 times slower, so it is only a good idea if you don't need compression on the fly.