First of all, nobody expected a lockdown. Nobody expected all the businesses will be paused or shifted to a total remote mode. And if most of the professions suffer from the lost opportunities and quarantine restrictions, developers (as they did so before for many years already) are the most used to ‘work from home’ people. And the new situation affected them not as much as others.

However, many of my friends working with aviation or travel, stayed without work. I hope, you all are ok.

I haven’t released March JS digest because of the start of the quarantine — I had a lot of work to do, and I suppose, many of you were busy with more important stuff than comparing and seeking for the best open source projects.

But now the situation is a bit better and I found some time to monitor what exactly had happened with JS repositories on GitHub in these two months, and what developers prefer for their projects when working from home.

Hence, we can grasp an overall situation and predict some trends to be followed in May. Stay safe!

Most popular JS repositories in March and April 2020

1. Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build websites and apps. 34,978 stars by now.
2. marked.js is a markdown parser and compiler. Built for speed. 22,199 stars by now.
3. AVA is a test runner for Node.js with a concise API, detailed error output, embrace of new language features, and process isolation. 17,842 stars by now.
4. Immer (German for: always) is a tiny package that allows you to work with immutable state in a more convenient way. It is based on the copy-on-write mechanism. 16,266 stars by now.
5. Playwright is a Node library to automate Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with a single API. Playwright is built to enable cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable, and fast. 11,667 stars by now.
6. plotly.js is an open-source JavaScript charting library behind Plotly and Dash. 11,600 stars by now.
7. FullCalendar is a full-sized drag & drop JavaScript event calendar. 11,168 stars by now.
8. Trianglify is a library that creates algorithmically generated triangle art (SVG background). 9,302 stars by now.
9. Nano ID is a tiny (108 bytes), secure, URL-friendly, unique string ID generator for JavaScript. 9,129 stars by now.
10. MDX is an authorable format that lets you seamlessly use JSX in your markdown documents. You can import components, like interactive charts or notifications, and export metadata. 8,705 stars by now.
11. Bull is a Redis-based queue package for handling distributed jobs and messages in NodeJS. 8,237 stars by now.
12. Rome is an experimental JavaScript toolchain. It includes a compiler, linter, formatter, bundler, testing framework, and more. It aims to be a comprehensive tool for anything related to the processing of JavaScript source code. 8,193 stars by now.
13. ioredis is a robust, performance-focused, and full-featured Redis client for Node.js. 7,505 stars by now.
14. Tippy.js is a tooltip, popover, dropdown, and menu solution for the web. 7,352 stars by now.
15. Alpine.js is a rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behavior in your markup. 7,050 stars by now.
16. ts-node is a TypeScript execution and REPL for Node.js. 6,630 stars by now.
17. Rickshaw is a JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time-series graphs, developed at Shutterstock. 6,446 stars by now.
18. Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel. 6,115 stars by now.
19. fkill-cli library stands for ‘Fabulously kill processes’. Cross-platform. 6,077 stars by now.
20. ora is an elegant terminal spinner. 5,927 stars by now.
21. Prompts is a library that stands for lightweight, beautiful, and user-friendly interactive prompts. 5,800 stars by now.
22. query-string helps you to parse and stringify URL query strings. 4,722 stars by now.
23. isomorphic-git is a pure JavaScript reimplementation of git that works in both Node.js and browser JavaScript environments. It can read and write to git repositories, fetch from and push to git remotes (such as GitHub), all without any native C++ module dependencies. 4,696 stars by now.
24. node-notifier is a Node.js module for sending notifications on native Mac, Windows, and Linux (or Growl as fallback). 4,454 stars by now.
25. Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals. It unifies all your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation with a single, consistent UI. 4,011 stars by now.
26. react-ga is a JavaScript module that can be used to include Google Analytics tracking code in a website or app that uses React for its frontend codebase. It does not currently use any React code internally but has been written for use with a number of Mozilla Foundation websites that are using React, as a way to standardize our GA Instrumentation across projects. 3,723 stars by now.
27. jExcel is a lightweight vanilla javascript plugin to create web-based interactive tables and spreadsheets compatible with Excel or any other spreadsheet software. 3,629 stars by now.
28. AutoCannon is an HTTP/1.1 benchmarking tool written in Node, with support for HTTP pipelining and HTTPS. 3,604 stars by now.
29. Dinero.js is a library for working with monetary values in JavaScript. 3,590 stars by now.
30. Redwood is an opinionated, full-stack, serverless web application framework that will allow you to build and deploy JAMstack applications with ease. 3,341 stars by now.
31. franc is s natural language detection. 3,334 stars by now.
32. webpack-blocks is a library that helps you by providing functional building blocks for your webpack config: easier way to configure webpack and to share configuration between projects. 2,820 stars by now.
33. hotkey to trigger an action on a target element when a key or sequence of keys is pressed on the keyboard. This triggers a focus event on form fields or a click event on others. 2,041 stars by now.
34. Serialize JavaScript to a superset of JSON that includes regular expressions and functions. 2,012 stars by now.
35. React Easy State is a simple React state management. 2,006 stars by now.
36. Qoa is a minimal interactive command-line prompts. The library utilizes a simple & minimal usage syntax and contains 7 configurable console interfaces, such as plain text, confirmation & password/secret prompts as well as single keypress, quiz & multiple-choice navigable menus. 1,931 stars by now.
37. kasaya is a “WYSIWYG” scripting language and runtime for browser automation. 1,808 stars by now.
38. match-sorter is a simple, expected, and deterministic best-match sorting of an array in JavaScript. 1,788 stars by now.
39. Crank.js helps you to write JSX-driven components with functions, promises, and generators. 1,622 stars by now.
40. Ervy brings charts to terminal. 1,481 stars by now.
41. iHateRegex.io is a regex cheat sheet for the haters. This project gives you a visual representation of regular expressions, embed regular expression visualization on your sites, code highlighting and validation, and more. 1,479 stars by now.
42. Stryker is a mutation testing for JavaScript and friends. 1,469 stars by now.
43. react-enroute is a simple React router with a small footprint for modern browsers. This package is not meant to be a drop-in replacement for react-router, just a smaller simpler alternative. 1,441 stars by now.
44. OpenChakra is a visual editor and code generator for React using Chakra UI. You can draft components with the simple drag and drop UI. 1,429 stars by now.
45. jest-dom stands for custom jest matchers to test the state of the DOM. 1,417 stars by now.
46. Notyf is a minimalistic JavaScript library for toast notifications. It’s responsive, A11Y compatible, dependency-free and tiny (~3KB). Easy integration with React, Angular, and Vue. 1,361 stars by now.
47. on-change allows you to watch an object or array for changes. 1,354 stars by now.
48. React Awesome Slider is a 60fps content transition slider that renders an animated set of production-ready UI general-purpose sliders. 1,317 stars by now.
49. Panolens.js is an event-driven and WebGL based panorama viewer. Lightweight and flexible. It's built on top of Three.JS. 1,254 stars by now.
50. Uppload is a JavaScript image uploader. It’s highly customizable with 30+ plugins, completely free and open-source, and can be used with any file uploading backend. 1,235 stars by now.
51. telebot is a library supporting an easy way to write Telegram bots in Node.js. 898 stars by now.

Thank you for reading!