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Awesome Tiny JS Awesome

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Tiny front-end libraries to put your bundle on a diet. Rules:

Contents

UI Frameworks

UI frameworks (libraries?) provide declarative templates, event bindings, and observable state to update the view. I've been generous and expanded the size limit for this category to 4.5 kB (if you're boring, count them as 2 libraries), but also increased the star limit to 2K.

The following libraries are small and cool, but note they're about 500x less popular than preact. Kudos for deconstrucing the very essence of a "framework":

Now, for the openly experimental UI libraries:

And if being declarative is not your thing:

Event Emitters

Event emitter pattern is fairly easy to implement yourself, but why bother when you have these cool tools? With an arms race to build the smallest one, the limit is 0.5 kB.

State Managers

State managers combine observable state with actions and framework bindings, intended for app-wide state.

Signals

A signal-styled state manager provides observable values (aka signals), derived values and effects.

Honorable mention: oby could make it if it had tree-shaking, but otherwise is around 7 kB.

Reactive Programming

Another well-known state management approach is reactive programmning — operating on event streams, applying filters and transforms to end up with an observable value. Think RxJS, but tiny:

Routers and URL Utils

Do stuff on URL / history changes, with path matching and parsing:

Just want to parse or match URL paths without observing them? Here you go:

API Layer

fetch API has some boilerplate associated with it: serialize & parse data, reject on non-200 response, etc. These tiny packages handle it for you:

If for some reason you still need a fetch polyfill, try this one:

I18N

A map of strings might seem enough to translate an app, but these tools also handle interpolation and some extra goodies:

Dates and Time

Date and time manipulation in pure JS is verbose. Luckily, two of the top date libraries have sensible size:

And some more packages that only do formatting:

Note that the built-in Intl.DateTimeFormat has decent support.

Generic Utilities

Something you'd find in lodash or ramda, but smaller. Most are pretty similar and very small, with minor differences in package structure (single / package-per-helper) and tree shaking vs direct helper import.

Honorable mention: underscore, contains many sub-1 kB helpers. It does not tree-shake as well as the libraries above due to codebase structure.

Note: lodash itself is not tree-shakable, but has made many attempts at modulaity with lodash.method packages, imports from lodash/method, and lodash-es, none of which work well in practice.

Also note that much of the original lodash functionality comes built-in with modern ES. Prefer native versions over libraries as your browser target allows.

Validation

To check if an object matches an expected schema, you'd often use zod, yup, joi or ajv. But 90% of the time you can get what you need in under 2 kB. Note: I compare a base validation subset (core + object / array + string / number / boolean) under tree-shaking to avoid punishing libs that have more features.

Unique ID Generation

Unique ID generation does not take a lot of code, but it's not someting I'd want to write myself. Limit is 500 bytes. Also note that the native crypto.randomUUID has OK support.

Colors

Color manipulation is rare in pure UI development, but very helpful for data visualization, and uses freaky math. Don't fry your brain, take these:

Touch Gestures

Touch gestures like swipe, drag, pinch or doubletap are a staple of mobile UX, but recognizing a series of touchmove / pointer events as a gesture is tricky, and testing is painful. Here are two libraries that do the heavy lifting for you:

Even if you want to detect gestures yourself, juggling mouse, touch and pointer events is hard enough, and browser inconsistencies don't help. Here are two more libraries to assist with that:

Honorable mentions: any-touch attempts a modular approach to gesture detection, but the core is around 2 kB without any gesture recognizers. rc-gesture, used in ant design system, could be the only react component on the list, but babel-runtime / corejs polyfills hard-wired into the build push the ~2.5 kB size to over 10 kB.

Text Search

Text search is important for client-side filtering and autosuggests. Naive option.includes(search) has no sensible order on the results, and ignoring word boundaries gives unexpected matches like spa -> newSPAper. First, here are some libraries that prioritize word matches:

One way to find sensible inexact matches is stemming — converting words to a root form. Walked will match walking, etc. Here are a few Porter stemmers for English language:

For non-English words, I only have honorable mentions: snowball-js is 17 kB with 15 languages, lunr-languages supports 30 languages but only works with lunr, the most promising one is natural but it depends on Node.js.

Fuzzy search

Fuzzy search is another take on inexact matching — the words can be modified. First, we have libraries that only allow insertion: spacecat -> SPACECrAfT. Not perfect for general-purpose text search, but great for filename, command, or URL lookups.

Finally, one library is specifically built for spellchecking:

Contributing

Suggestions welcome! See contributing.md, or drop an issue.

Footnotes

See WIP for possibly awesome libraries I have found, but not yet analyzed deeply, and incubate for awesome libraries that don't meet popularity criteria yet.

Collected and reviewed by Vladimir Klepov in 2023.