Ultimately I\'m trying to accomplish the following styles with LESS.
EDITED
While I couldn't think of a way to fully accomplish what you wanted, with some help and inspiration from @seven-phases-max, I was able to adapt that gist to get your desired result.
To get a picture of how it works, the 'steps' are: First, treat the button selector as .btn.btn-default. Second, find all instances of the .btn-group selector and replace it with .filter. Then, finally, find all instances of .btn within the .filter and replace those with button.
You can accomplish this with extend (available in Less v1.4.0+). Here is a simple example of the less file:
@import "bootstrap.less";
button {
.btn-default();
&:extend(.btn, .btn.btn-default all);
}
.filter:extend(.btn-group all) {}
.filter > button:extend(.btn-group > .btn all) {}
.filter button + button:extend(.btn-group .btn + .btn all) {}
You need to make sure that any extend is placed after your other imports because the extend all acts like (a non-destructive) search & replace. So, the first extend above, for example, finds all instances of .btn within any rule selector and makes a copy of the selector, replacing .btn with button.
The resulting output allows the following to be styled like a btn-group:
<div class="filter">
<button type="button">BUTTON ONLY</button>
<button type="button">BUTTON ONLY</button>
<button type="button">BUTTON ONLY</button>
</div>
CAVEATS
data-toggle="buttons"
attribute as the BUTTON DATA-API inside button.js is looking specifically for the class .btn versus looking for a button element.