ETethanpil·Jun 15, 2026Submission
Surreal.js – 320 line jQuery alternative with inline Locality of Behavior
3 points · Open discussiongnat
surreal
JavaScript2023–2026
gnat / surreal
surreal
🗿 Mini jQuery alternative. Dependency-free animations. Locality of Behavior. Use one element or arrays transparently. Pairs with htmx. Vanilla querySelector() but better!
5Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
🗿 Mini jQuery alternative. Dependency-free animations. Locality of Behavior. Use one element or arrays transparently. Pairs with htmx. Vanilla querySelector() but better!
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year10 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2023-06-23 04:32:00 UTC to 2026-06-15 16:48:10 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesI recently had a similar junk PR on my 1,700 star repository: https://github.com/gnat/surreal/pull/56
I'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated; the content is nonsensical garbage.
PS: If an LLM needs a whole seperate fork to understand your content, the LLM is failing at it's job.
PS PS: I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library quantizor made pulled in as a new dependency. Nasty.
In Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering teamAnother interesting approach IMHO is https://github.com/gnat/surreal
In Marko – A declarative, HTML‑based language2 neat libraries I've found to work like this are Surreal[1] and CSS-Scope-Inline[2] to get your Locality of Behavior (and Style) without a huge overhead.
That said, your markup can get unwieldy fairly quick, and you end up with a lot of similar and duplicated code/style blocks. My solution on a personal site, was to also use a backend-style templating library with partials[3], a file watcher[4] to build them automatically etc to kind of SSG a static site while maintaining reusable components. You can see where this is going, at what point does it make sense to just "reach for xyz framework" out of the gate? For as often as people (especially here) cry "ya aint gonna need it", there are at least as many times where people (less vocally) cry silently to themself, "I wish I'd just used a framework instead of unintentionally building a frank
Read the rest
en-framework".
This from a minimalist developer who has been doing it for a long time, with STRONG opinions about the modern state of the art. Honestly, it's very common for me to feel torn about ideals vs actual pragmatism.
[1]: https://github.com/gnat/surreal
[2]: https://github.com/gnat/css-scope-inline
[3]: https://github.com/leafo/lapis
[4]: https://gittup.org/tup
For those interested in jQuery alternatives- I've been waiting for jQuery 4.0 soooo long I ended up making my own jQuery with some key differences:
* Animations, tweens, timelines use pure CSS, instead of jQuery's custom system.
* Use one element or lists transparently.
* Inline <script> Locality of Behavior. No more inventing unique "one time" names.
* Vanilla first. Zero dependencies. 1 file. Under 340 lines.
https://github.com/gnat/surreal
In Cash: A small jQuery alternative for modern browsersYeah, go w/ htmx + vanillajs (or possibly alpine.js or https://github.com/gnat/surreal) would be a reasonable option for many government projects. You can audit the htmx codebase and it is dependency free (same w/ alpine & surreal) and self-host everything, go compiles to a single binary for deployment.
In Switzerland now requires all government software to be open sourceAwesome. My problem is I've been waiting for 4.0 soooo long I ended up making my own jQuery with some key differences:
* Animations, tweens, timelines use pure CSS, instead of jQuery's custom system.
* Use one element or lists transparently.
* Inline <script> Locality of Behavior. No more inventing unique "one time" names.
* Vanilla first. Zero dependencies. 1 file. Under 340 lines.
https://github.com/gnat/surreal
That said, it's fantastic to see 4.0 here, and I'll certainly be upgrading my many sites that use it!
In jQuery v4.0 BetaShow HN: Tiny jQuery alternative with inline Locality of Behavior
30 points · Open discussionSurreal – A small jQuery-like utility that pairs with Htmx
1 points · Open discussionMostly obsolete with CSS tweening.
You can do non-blocking animation timelines without any library if you use async javascript.
<html>
<body>
<div>Click me to change color every second, then remove.
<script>
// Locality of Behavior
me = document.currentScript.parentElement;
me.addEventListener("click", async event => {
me = event.target
me.style.transition = "background 1s"
await sleep(1000)
me.style.background = "red"
await sleep(1000)
me.style.background = "green"
await sleep(1000)
me.style.background = "blue"
await sleep(1000)
me.style.background = "none"
await sleep(1000)
me.remove()
})
const sleep = ms => new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, ms));
</script>
</div>
</body>
</html>
If you like th
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is, you may also want to check out: https://github.com/gnat/surreal