little-time

moment.js is a great tool, but oftentimes folks want to use only a few of its many functions, namely time formatting and relative times (e.g. 5 minutes ago). To bring in all of moment.js just for those few simple functions ends up being a lot of wasted bandwidth and extra processing time the client needs to perform before page load. Even if you run a dead code eliminator, you still incur extra processing time each time you need to re-minify your code, resulting in increased build times.

In response, here's a tiny alternative with just a few essential functions. And for convenience, they have the same function signatures as moment.js!

Minimalist Features:

• Only ~1.5kb gzipped
• time formatter (e.g. convert 'ddd MMM Do YYYY HH:mm:ss' to 'Fri Aug 5th 2016 16:23:45pm')
• relative time from now (e.g. '10 hours ago')
• relative time between any two times
• UTC support

Installation

npm install little-time

Examples

format()

Time formatter syntax is the same used by moment.js.

Display current time.

Default formatter ('YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ')

littleTime().format();
// "2016-08-05T16:23:45Z"

Custom formatter

littleTime().format('ddd MMM Do YYYY HH:mm:ss');
// "Fri Aug 5th 2016 16:23:45"

Time formats

Anything that the native JS Date object parses can be inputted.

These are all acceptable:

littleTime(1404843535580);
littleTime('Jul 07 2020 20:10:23');
littleTime(Date.now());
littleTime(new Date('Jul 07 2020 20:10:23'));

Relative times (durations)

From now

littleTime(1404843535580).fromNow();
// "2 years ago"

Duration between two times

littleTime(1470338048328).from(1470368048328);
// "8 hours ago"

Duration between two times, with no "ago" or "in" suffix/prefix

littleTime(1470338048328).from(1470368048328, true);
// "8 hours"

Duration between two times, one in the future

littleTime(1470368048328).from(1470338048328);
// "in 8 hours"

Duration between two little-time instances

var firstTime = littleTime('2016-08-28 12:00:00');
var secondTime = littleTime('2016-08-27 12:00:00');
firstTime.from(secondTime, true);
// "a day"

UTC support.

All methods above can be used for outputting UTC times.

UTC default formatter

littleTime.utc('2016-08-28 12:00:00-07:00').format();
// "2016-08-28T19:00:00Z"

UTC custom format function

littleTime.utc('2016-08-28 12:00:00-07:00').format('ddd MMM Do YYYY hh:mm:ssa');
// "Sun Aug 28th 2016 07:00:00pm"

UTC time from now

littleTime.utc('2016-08-29 12:00:00-07:00').fromNow();
// "50 minutes ago"

Changelog

• 1.1.7 added formatters for quarter (Q, Qo), non-iso week of year (w, ww, wo)
• 1.1.4 from: fix logic when working with two little-time instances.
• 1.1.0 from/fromNow: support for future times. Internal code cleanup for better minification.
• 1.0.0 API changed, fixed fatal errors from previous version. Many formatter changes and fixes.
• 0.2.0 added fromNow() and from()
• 0.1.0 Initial version, with only formatting and UTC support

License

MIT