Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Tiny jQuery alternative with inline Locality of Behavior

🗿 Mini jQuery alternative. Dependency-free animations. Locality of Behavior. Use one element or arrays transparently. Pairs with htmx. Vanilla querySelector() but better! - gnat/surreal

This is a lightweight JavaScript library designed as an alternative to jQuery. It emphasizes inline Locality of Behavior, allowing developers to keep related code close together in markup rather than separated into… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Tiny jQuery alternative with inline Locality of Behavior launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1. 1
   Umbrella JS, a 2.5kb jQuery alternative▲132

   :umbrella: Lightweight javascript library for DOM manipulation and events

   2018 · umbrellajs.com · its alternatives →

2. 2
   Minified.js – a fully-featured, 4K alternative to jQuery and MooTools▲158

   2013 · minifiedjs.com · its alternatives →

3. 3WJ
   Wiv.js – A library for a more wiggly div▲265

   2018 · jjkaufman.github.io · its alternatives →

4. 4
   Pts.js – A library for visualization and creative coding▲611

   Pts is a javascript library for visualization and creative-coding.

   2018 · ptsjs.org · its alternatives →

5. 5BJ
   Behave.js – Coding Behaviors for textarea elements▲180

   2013 · jakiestfu.github.com · its alternatives →

6. 6
   Minimal 3D creative coding tool – control 8×8×8 dots with JavaScript▲206

   A minimalist three-dimensional coding environment. Control 8x8x8 dots with a single JavaScript function.

   2021 · doersino.github.io · its alternatives →

7. 7
   µJS, a 5KB alternative to Htmx and Turbo with zero dependencies▲161

   I built µJS because I wanted AJAX navigation without the verbosity of HTMX or the overhead of Turbo. It intercepts links and form submissions, fetches pages via AJAX, and swaps fragments of the DOM. Single tag, one call to `mu.init()`. No build step, no dependencies. Key features: patch mode (update multiple fragments in one request), SSE support, DOM morphing via idiomorph, View Transitions, prefetch on hover, polling, and full HTTP verb support on any element. At ~5KB gzipped, it's smaller than HTMX (16KB) and Turbo (25KB), and works with any backend: PHP, Python, Go, Ruby, whatever.…

   Mar 2026 · mujs.org · its alternatives →

8. 8JL
   JS library to make your website instant▲426

   http://instantclick.io/ It seems the internet architecture won't bring us instant websites anytime soon. So here is a hack. I released this JS library last month (today is version 2.0 release, fixing v1.0's rough edges), it makes use of HTML5's pushState and preloading to make a website instant. It works like this: before clicking on a link, you'll hover over it. And there's a delay of 200-300 ms between these two events. InstantClick uses this delay to preload a page, when you click on a link it will display instantly in most case. (You can test on the website.) That's…

   2014 · its alternatives →

9. 9
   CalDOM: An agnostic, reactive and minimalist JavaScript UI library▲107

   An agnostic, reactive & minimalist (3kb) JavaScript UI library with direct access to native DOM.

   2021 · caldom.org · its alternatives →

10. 10
    Auto-generate vanilla JavaScript alternatives for jQuery methods▲137

    Automatically finds jQuery methods from existing projects and generates vanilla js alternatives. - sachinchoolur/jquery-to-javascript-converter

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

11. 11
    Anime.js – Polyvalent JavaScript Animation Engine▲283

    A fast, multipurpose and lightweight JavaScript animation library

    2016 · anime-js.com · its alternatives →

12. 12
    Lax.js▲343

    Create beautiful & smooth animations when you scroll

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

13. 13
    Fast.js – faster reimplementations of native JavaScript functions▲323

    Faster user-land reimplementations for several common builtin native JavaScript functions. - codemix/fast.js

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

14. 14
    Blotter.js▲243

    A JavaScript API for unconventional text effects on the web.

    2018 · blotter.js.org · its alternatives →

15. 15RJ
    Ramjet.js – Morph DOM elements into each other▲309

    2015 · rich-harris.co.uk · its alternatives →

16. 16
    JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes▲211

    (spoiler: its XSLT) I've been working on a little demo for how to avoid copy-pasting header/footer boilerplate on a simple static webpage. My goal is to approximate the experience of Jekyll/Hugo but eliminate the need for a build step before publishing. This demo shows how to get basic templating features with XSL so you could write a blog post which looks like My Article some content hello hello Some properties which set this approach apart from other methods: - no build step (no need to setup Jekyll on the client or configure Github/Gitlab actions) - works on any webserver…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

17. 17GJ
    G9.js – Automatically Interactive Differentiable Graphics▲237

    2016 · omrelli.ug · its alternatives →

18. 18
    An experimental data-flow analysis tool for JavaScript▲95

    Find the origin of any character in the DOM

    2019 · fromjs.com · its alternatives →

19. 19
    uFuzzy.js – A tiny, efficient fuzzy search that doesn't suck▲251

    Hello HN! I became frustrated with the unpredictible/poor match quality and opaqueness of "relevance scores" in existing fuzzy and fulltext search libs, so I tried something different and this is the result. The main selling point is the result quality / ordering, with best-in-class memory overhead and excellent performance being bonuses. The API is pretty stable at this point, but looking for feedback before committing to 1.0. TL;DR The test corpus is a 4MB json file with 162k words/phrases, so give it a second for initial download. You can also drag/drop your own…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

20. 20
    Swap.js – a JavaScript micro-framework (HTML fragments over the wire)▲127

    Hi HN! I created this lib in the need of a simple and tiny framework to easily do AJAX-style navigation / replacement of fragments in the page, in a web application. For people who don't want to use client-side-rendering and complex frameworks à la React, there are nowadays a few "HTML-over-the-wire" libraries, like HTMX, Unpoly or this super-tiny one Swap.js :) One other key thing is that no external tool is needed: no bundler, no webpack, no TypeScript compiler, no minification needed. Just write HTML, JS (+ your preferred server-side language: PHP, Python, etc.) and it works. The…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

21. 21AJ
    A JavaScript UI library for imperative JSX▲41

    I've been building a web UI library for a side project of mine. I thought it might be useful to others, so I'm releasing it as open source. To put it simply, I realized that most of my pain points with React come from its declarative model ui=f(state). So I'm trying something that I'm calling "imperative JSX." Instead of treating JSX as the source of truth for your UI, it essentially becomes a query interface for DOM manipulation. I first had the idea for it a few months ago, and only began writing it in earnest last week, so it's extremely early and nowhere near production-ready. Still, I'd…

    2024 · npmjs.com · its alternatives →

22. 22VJ
    Velocity.js – Accelerated JavaScript animation▲160

    Velocity.js: An incredibly fast animation engine for motion designers.

    2014 · velocityjs.org · its alternatives →

23. 23
    FastDom – Lightweight replacement of React and MobX▲41

    Full reactivity JS/TS framework. Lightweight replacement of React + MobX + React Router. Very small and fast !! - PxyUp/Revact

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

24. 24
    Fast DOM manipulation with jQuery-like syntax▲31

    fasterDOM.js - faster DOM manipulation. Contribute to bndr/fasterDOM.js development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2013 · github.com · its alternatives →

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →