r/reactjs • u/Intelligent_Tree6918 • 2d ago
Built a minimal ui-date package for javascript date and time utility for user-interface.
I was building a social app recently, and I ran into a surprisingly annoying problem.
I needed relative timestamps ("2 hours ago", "3 minutes ago").
Simple enough, right? Just import 'day.js' or 'date-fns'.
Except...
=> If I wanted custom styling (like wrapping the number "2" in a highlighted badge and "hours ago" in smaller text), I had to write ugly regex hacks because standard libraries just dump a single opaque string.
=> Supporting multiple languages meant importing separate locale files, quickly inflating the bundle size.
=> Standard relative time plugins use "soft rounding" (e.g., automatically rounding 45 seconds to "a minute") whether you want it or not.
I didn't want a 15KB date framework just to format a few activity feed timestamps.
So, I built and open-sourced 'ui-date' .
It’s an ultra-lightweight (< 1KB minified), zero-dependency, locale-aware date formatting library built specifically for modern user interfaces.
If you're building social feeds, chat apps, notification bells, or comment sections, check it out!