Topics / #lightweight

Lightweight projects on GitHub

Minimal footprint tools favoring speed and simplicity

As of , the most-starred Lightweight projects on GitHub are anime (73.7K stars), Pake (62.1K stars) and dayjs (48.7K stars). GitHub.Locker tracks 87 Lightweight repositories with 1.3M stars combined. The fastest-growing on October 16 was spotifast, with +96 stars in a day.

87Projects
1.3MStars in total
+520Stars in a day
Browse in the catalog →github.com/topics/lightweight ↗

Hot right now

Most stars gained in a day · Oct 16

+96

spotifast

crmne/spotifast · ★ 8.4K

Fastpotify is a lightweight, native Spotify client written in Rust with the egui toolkit, playing music through librespot while using a fraction of the RAM of Spotify's official desktop app.

+52

KittenTTS

KittenML/KittenTTS · ★ 16.1K

Kitten TTS is an open-source, lightweight text-to-speech library built on ONNX that converts text into natural-sounding speech using tiny 15M-80M parameter models, running entirely on CPU.

+45

tinycast

abue-ammar/tinycast · ★ 8.6K

Tinycast is a tiny, fully native macOS launcher: one global hotkey summons a palette for launching apps, clipboard history, snippets, window tiling and more — all under 100 MB of RAM.

+43

beszel

henrygd/beszel · ★ 26.3K

Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform with a friendly web interface. It tracks historical metrics and Docker container stats, sends alerts, and is ready to use out of the box.

The all-time top

87 projects · by stars

  1. #1 · juliangarnier/anime

    anime

    Anime.js is a fast, multipurpose and lightweight JavaScript animation library with a simple yet powerful API for animating things on the web.

    73.7K
  2. #2 · tw93/Pake

    Pake

    Pake turns any webpage into a small, fast desktop app with a single command — ChatGPT, YouTube, Notion, whatever you use daily.

    62.1K
  3. #3 · iamkun/dayjs

    dayjs

    Day.js is a minimalist JavaScript library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and displaying dates and times, built as a lightweight alternative to Moment.js.

    48.7K
  1. 4

    vim-plug

    35.8Kjunegunn/vim-plug · Vim Script

    vim-plug is a minimalist plugin manager for Vim and Neovim, implemented as a single script file with no external dependencies.

  2. 5

    hono

    32.6Khonojs/hono · TypeScript

    Hono (Japanese for 'flame' 🔥) is a small, simple, and ultrafast web framework built on Web Standards for the TypeScript and JavaScript ecosystem.

  3. 6

    alpine

    32Kalpinejs/alpine · HTML

    Alpine.js is a rugged, minimal framework that lets you add interactive JavaScript behavior directly as attributes in your HTML markup, without a build step or component system.

  4. 7

    micro

    29.7Kmicro-editor/micro · Go

    micro is a terminal-based text editor aiming to be easy to use and intuitive — a kind of successor to nano, packaged as a single static binary that's comfortable enough for full-time work in a terminal or over SSH.

  5. 8

    obscura

    29Kh4ckf0r0day/obscura · Rust

    An open-source headless browser engine written in Rust, built for web scraping and AI agent automation. It runs real JavaScript via an embedded V8 and supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol.

  6. 9

    NvChad

    28.5KNvChad/NvChad · Lua

    NvChad is a blazing fast configuration framework for Neovim: it wraps the editor in solid defaults, a polished UI and a full IDE-style plugin set.

  7. 10

    Wox

    27.5KWox-launcher/Wox · Go

    Wox is an open-source launcher for Windows, macOS, and Linux — an alternative to Raycast, Alfred, or Spotlight. One input pops up, and you search and act from the keyboard.

  8. 11

    nanoid

    27.1Kai/nanoid · JavaScript

    Nano ID is a tiny, secure, URL-friendly unique string ID generator for JavaScript that produces 21-character IDs with collision odds similar to UUID v4.

  9. 12

    cool-retro-term

    26.5KSwordfish90/cool-retro-term · QML

    A terminal emulator that mimics the look and feel of old cathode tube screens — a retro-styled terminal designed to be eye-candy, customizable, and reasonably lightweight.

  10. 13

    beszel

    26.3Khenrygd/beszel · Go

    Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform with a friendly web interface. It tracks historical metrics and Docker container stats, sends alerts, and is ready to use out of the box.

  11. 14

    EventBus

    24.7Kgreenrobot/EventBus · Java

    EventBus is a publish/subscribe event bus for Android and Java. It simplifies communication between components — Activities, Fragments, Threads, Services — and decouples event senders from receivers.

  12. 15

    distroless

    23.1KGoogleContainerTools/distroless · Starlark

    A set of minimal container base images that contain only your application and its runtime dependencies — no package managers, shells or other programs you would expect in a normal Linux distribution.

  13. 16

    lowdb

    22.6Ktypicode/lowdb · JavaScript

    lowdb is a small, type-safe local JSON database for JavaScript: you read or create a db.json file and change data with plain JavaScript, including native Array functions.

  14. 17

    nnn

    22.1Kjarun/nnn · C

    nnn (n3) is a terminal file manager built for speed and low resource use. The binary is typically around 100KB, it usually needs less than 3.5MB of resident memory, and it runs fine even with 8 colors.

  15. 18

    Maccy

    22Kp0deje/Maccy · Swift

    Maccy is a lightweight, open-source clipboard manager for macOS. It keeps the history of everything you copy and lets you quickly search, navigate, and reuse previous clipboard contents.

  16. 19

    HivisionIDPhotos

    21.6KZeyi-Lin/HivisionIDPhotos · Python

    An open-source AI tool for making ID photos: it cuts the person out of an ordinary snapshot with matting models and generates standard ID photos in various sizes with the right background color.

  17. 20

    cosmopolitan

    21.4Kjart/cosmopolitan · C

    Cosmopolitan Libc makes C/C++ a build-once run-anywhere language: you compile once and the same native binary runs on Linux, Mac, Windows, the BSDs and even BIOS - like Java, but with no interpreter or virtual machine.

  18. 21

    sonic

    21.4Kvaleriansaliou/sonic · Rust

    Sonic is a fast, lightweight and schema-less search backend written in Rust — a simple alternative to heavyweight systems like Elasticsearch, built to answer search queries in microseconds.

  19. 22

    jotai

    21.3Kpmndrs/jotai · TypeScript

    Jotai is a primitive and flexible state management library for React. It scales from a simple useState replacement all the way to an enterprise TypeScript application.

  20. 23

    rough

    21.3Krough-stuff/rough · HTML

    Rough.js is a small (<9 kB) JavaScript graphics library that makes drawings look sketchy and hand-drawn instead of clean and geometric.

  21. 24

    HikariCP

    21.2Kbrettwooldridge/HikariCP · Java

    A high-performance JDBC connection pool for Java: it keeps a ready pool of database connections your app can reuse instead of opening a new one for every request. It is billed as zero-overhead and production ready.

  22. 25

    TranslucentTB

    20.6KTranslucentTB/TranslucentTB · C++

    A lightweight utility that makes the Windows taskbar translucent or transparent on Windows 10 and 11. It uses only a few MB of RAM and almost no CPU.

  23. 26

    Fuse

    20.5Kkrisk/Fuse · JavaScript

    Fuse.js is a lightweight, zero-dependency fuzzy-search library for JavaScript and TypeScript. It runs in the browser and on Node, and is built for searching small-to-medium datasets client-side instead of standing up a dedicated search backend.

  24. 27

    SpinKit

    19.3Ktobiasahlin/SpinKit · CSS

    SpinKit is a collection of loading spinners animated with pure CSS — a stylesheet you drop into a web project to get smooth loading indicators without JavaScript or images.

  25. 28

    hyperapp

    19.2Khyperapp/hyperapp · JavaScript

    Hyperapp is a tiny (about 1kB) JavaScript framework for building purely functional, browser-based 'hypertext applications' using views, actions, effects and subscriptions.

  26. 29

    wasmtime

    18.7Kbytecodealliance/wasmtime · Rust

    Wasmtime is a lightweight WebAssembly runtime: it executes WebAssembly (wasm) programs quickly and securely. It is written in Rust and developed under the Bytecode Alliance.

  27. 30

    skrollr

    18.4KPrinzhorn/skrollr · HTML

    A stand-alone JavaScript library for parallax scrolling effects, about 12k minified, working on desktop and mobile (Android, iOS) browsers — really a full-fledged scrolling-animation library, with parallax just one use case.

  28. 31

    zincsearch

    17.9Kzincsearch/zincsearch · Go

    A search engine that does full-text indexing — a lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch, written in Go and built on the bluge indexing library. It runs using a fraction of Elasticsearch's resources.

  29. 32

    classnames

    17.8KJedWatson/classnames · JavaScript

    A tiny JavaScript utility that conditionally joins className strings together, commonly used to build dynamic 'className' props for React and other UI code.

  30. 33

    pico

    16.8Kpicocss/pico · CSS

    Pico is a minimal CSS framework for semantic HTML: one stylesheet that makes plain HTML elements responsive and elegant by default. MIT-licensed and built around writing HTML, not classes.

  31. 34

    flatpickr

    16.5Kflatpickr/flatpickr · TypeScript

    flatpickr is a lightweight JavaScript datetime picker for the web — a polished calendar popup that attaches to your inputs and handles dates, times, and date ranges.

  32. 35

    MailHog

    16.2Kmailhog/MailHog · Go

    MailHog is an email testing tool for developers. You point your application's outgoing SMTP at it, then view the captured mail in a web UI or fetch it through a JSON API, instead of delivering it for real.

  33. 36

    KittenTTS

    16.1KKittenML/KittenTTS · Python

    Kitten TTS is an open-source, lightweight text-to-speech library built on ONNX that converts text into natural-sounding speech using tiny 15M-80M parameter models, running entirely on CPU.

  34. 37

    yq

    16.1Kmikefarah/yq · Go

    yq is a lightweight, portable command-line processor for YAML, JSON, XML, INI and more — you pipe data through jq-like expressions to read, edit or convert it right in the terminal.

  35. 38

    SuperTinyIcons

    15.4Kedent/SuperTinyIcons · Python

    A free collection of minuscule SVG icons for popular websites, apps, and social media logos, each kept under 1KB in file size.

  36. 39

    riot

    14.9Kriot/riot · JavaScript

    Riot is a lightweight component-based UI library that brings custom components (custom tags) to all modern browsers, aiming to give you everything you wished the native Web Components API provided, with a tiny footprint and simple API.

  37. 40

    mithril.js

    14.5KMithrilJS/mithril.js · JavaScript

    Mithril.js is a modern client-side JavaScript framework for building Single Page Applications. It is small (8.93 KB gzipped), fast, and ships with routing and XHR utilities out of the box.

  38. 41

    nitter

    14.5Kzedeus/nitter · Nim

    A free, open source alternative front-end for Twitter, focused on privacy and performance — it was inspired by the Invidious project. You browse Twitter through a Nitter instance instead of twitter.com.

  39. 42

    rathole

    14.3Krathole-org/rathole · Rust

    Rathole is a secure, stable, high-performance reverse proxy written in Rust that exposes a service running on a device behind NAT to the Internet through a server with a public IP, similar to frp and ngrok.

  40. 43

    GenericAgent

    14.3Klsdefine/GenericAgent · Python

    GenericAgent (GA) is a minimal, self-evolving autonomous agent framework that gives any LLM system-level control over a local computer - browser, terminal, filesystem, keyboard/mouse, screen vision, and mobile via ADB. Instead of preloading skills, it crystallizes every solved task into a reusable 'Skill', growing a personal skill tree from a ~3K-line seed.

  41. 44

    nuklear

    14Kvurtun/nuklear · C

    Nuklear is a minimal state immediate mode graphical user interface toolkit written in ANSI C (C89) and released into the public domain, meant to be embedded into your application.

  42. 45

    logger

    13.8Korhanobut/logger · Kotlin

    Logger is a simple, pretty, and powerful logging library for Android that makes Logcat output easier to read.

  43. 46

    supertonic

    13.8Ksupertone-oss-archive/supertonic · Swift

    Supertonic is a lightning-fast, on-device text-to-speech system: it converts text into 44.1kHz 16-bit WAV speech locally via ONNX Runtime — no cloud, no API calls, no GPU. The open-weight model, Supertonic 3, covers 31 languages.

  44. 47

    prism

    13.1KPrismJS/prism · JavaScript

    Prism is a lightweight, robust, and elegant syntax highlighting library for the web — a spin-off project from Dabblet.

  45. 48

    cJSON

    13KDaveGamble/cJSON · C

    An ultralightweight JSON parser written in plain ANSI C. The whole thing is one C file and one header, with the stated goal of being the dumbest parser that still gets your job done.

  46. 49

    comlink

    12.8KGoogleChromeLabs/comlink · TypeScript

    Comlink is a tiny library (~1.1kB) that provides an RPC implementation over postMessage for WebWorkers and ES6 Proxies, so you can use an object from another thread as if it were local instead of manually handling postMessage.

  47. 50

    snabbdom

    12.4Ksnabbdom/snabbdom · TypeScript

    Snabbdom is a virtual DOM library focused on simplicity, modularity, powerful features and performance. You describe your UI as vnodes and it efficiently patches the real DOM to match.

  48. 51

    chineseocr_lite

    12.3KDayBreak-u/chineseocr_lite · C++

    An ultra-lightweight Chinese OCR engine: it finds and recognizes text in images, including vertical text. Detection, recognition and angle classification run on three tiny models that total only 4.7MB, entirely on CPU.

  49. 52

    InversifyJS

    12.1Kinversify/InversifyJS · TypeScript

    InversifyJS is a lightweight inversion of control (IoC) container for TypeScript and JavaScript apps — a library that decides how your classes receive the objects they depend on.

  50. 53

    pell

    12Kjaredreich/pell · JavaScript

    pell is a WYSIWYG rich text editor for the web — the simplest and smallest one around, with zero dependencies. You embed it in a page and users get a toolbar for formatting text.

  51. 54

    svg.js

    11.8Ksvgdotjs/svg.js · JavaScript

    SVG.js is a lightweight JavaScript library for creating, manipulating, and animating SVG graphics in the browser, with no external dependencies.

  52. 55

    inflector

    11.3Kdoctrine/inflector · PHP

    Doctrine Inflector is a small PHP library that performs string manipulations with regard to uppercase/lowercase and singular/plural forms of words.

  53. 56

    spectre

    11.3Kpicturepan2/spectre · CSS

    Spectre.css is a lightweight, responsive and modern CSS framework for building web UIs with a flexbox-based grid, prebuilt elements, components and utility classes.

  54. 57

    tini

    11.3Kkrallin/tini · C

    Tini is a tiny init process designed to run as PID 1 inside containers. It spawns your program as a child, reaps zombie processes, and forwards signals to the child so things like SIGTERM work correctly.

  55. 58

    spotifyd

    10.8KSpotifyd/spotifyd · Rust

    Spotifyd is an open-source Spotify client that runs as a background UNIX daemon instead of a GUI app, streaming music just like the official client but more lightweight.

  56. 59

    micro

    10.6Kvercel/micro · TypeScript

    Micro is a Node.js toolkit for building asynchronous HTTP microservices: you write a single async function and Micro turns it into a tiny, fast HTTP server.

  57. 60

    gocui

    10.6Kjroimartin/gocui · Go

    Gocui is a minimalist Go package for building Console User Interfaces — text-mode apps that run in the terminal, with windows, keybindings and mouse support.

  58. 61

    uPlot

    10.6Kleeoniya/uPlot · JavaScript

    uPlot is a small (~50 KB min), fast, MIT-licensed JavaScript charting library for time series, line, area, OHLC and bar charts, drawn on Canvas 2D in the browser.

  59. 62

    loaders.css

    10.2KConnorAtherton/loaders.css · CSS

    A collection of loading animations written entirely in CSS — you add a class to an element and get a spinner, with no images or JavaScript needed for the animation itself.

  60. 63

    tinycast

    8.6Kabue-ammar/tinycast · Swift

    Tinycast is a tiny, fully native macOS launcher: one global hotkey summons a palette for launching apps, clipboard history, snippets, window tiling and more — all under 100 MB of RAM.

  61. 64

    spotifast

    8.4Kcrmne/spotifast · Rust

    Fastpotify is a lightweight, native Spotify client written in Rust with the egui toolkit, playing music through librespot while using a fraction of the RAM of Spotify's official desktop app.

  62. 65

    LiteMonitor

    6.7KDiorser/LiteMonitor · C#

    LiteMonitor is a lightweight, customizable hardware monitoring tool for the Windows desktop and taskbar, showing real-time CPU, GPU, RAM, disk, network, and FPS stats.

  63. 66

    oat

    5.5Kknadh/oat · CSS

    Oat is an ultra-lightweight, zero-dependency semantic HTML+CSS+JS UI component library (~10KB min+gz) for building web interfaces without a framework or build step.

  64. 67

    PakePlus-Win7

    4.5KSjj1024/PakePlus-Win7 · JavaScript

    PacBao (PakePlus) turns any webpage, HTML, Vue or React project into a lightweight desktop or mobile app under 5MB in just a few minutes, with no dev environment to set up.

  65. 68

    reader3

    3.9Kkarpathy/reader3 · Python

    A lightweight, self-hosted EPUB reader by Andrej Karpathy that shows a book one chapter at a time, making it easy to paste a chapter to an LLM and read along together.

  66. 69

    mail

    1.4Kflectar/mail · Rust

    Flectar Mail is a native, open-source email client that also handles calendars and contacts, built in Rust for speed and low memory use instead of being a web app wrapped in a browser shell.

  67. 70

    StarPie

    1.2KStar-Pie/StarPie · C#

    StarPie (星盘) is a lightweight radial/pie-menu and mouse-gesture tool for Windows 10/11 that lets you trigger hotkeys, launch apps, open URLs, folders, run commands, manage windows and run screen OCR by holding a mouse button and flicking toward a sector.

  68. 71

    microlighter

    1.1Kdavatron5000/microlighter · JavaScript

    MicroLighter is a tiny, dependency-free syntax highlighter for the web. It colors code using the CSS Custom Highlight API and TextMate grammars, with no runtime dependencies and about 2 KiB compressed.

  69. 72

    mitex

    633mitex-rs/mitex · Rust

    MiTeX brings LaTeX support to Typst: it parses LaTeX into an abstract syntax tree, converts it into Typst code, and evaluates it into Typst content, so you can write LaTeX math directly in Typst documents.

  70. 73

    lollipop-css

    612nickhuang1121/lollipop-css · JavaScript

    LollipopCSS is a tiny CSS preprocessor that lets you define your own reusable values, shortcuts, and style snippets, which it then compiles back into normal CSS.

  71. 74

    GLiClass

    563Knowledgator/GLiClass · Python

    GLiClass is an efficient zero-shot model for sequence classification, inspired by GLiNER: give it a text and a list of candidate labels, and it classifies the text with accuracy comparable to cross-encoders.

  72. 75

    Jet

    533CubeCoders/Jet · C++

    Jet is a tiny, dependency-free, fixed-function 3D software rasteriser in C++17, built for embedded chips with little CPU and RAM like the ESP32 and STM32; it also runs on desktop PCs and Raspberry Pi.

  73. 76

    quickscan

    289yoli-mi/quickscan · Rust

    QuickScan is a tiny Windows desktop app that sits in your system tray: hit a hotkey, drag a selection box over any QR code on screen, and it decodes it instantly so you can copy or open the result.

  74. 77

    deepseek-harness-desktop

    285chokwinlee/deepseek-harness-desktop · Kotlin

    DSH Desktop is a compact desktop app that runs the official DeepSeek Harness (DSH) coding-agent Web UI and runtime inside a native window, plus it ships native iPhone and Android 'Remote' companion apps to view and steer the same sessions from your phone while all execution stays on the computer.

  75. 78

    NPC-Forge

    269gioblu/NPC-Forge · Python

    NPC-Forge is an open-source neuro-symbolic framework for building conversational agents with distinct personalities, multi-turn context, sentiment analysis and tool-call support. Its agents run on the CPU without machine learning or LLMs.

  76. 79

    microdnf

    250rpm-software-management/microdnf · C

    microdnf is a minimal, lightweight implementation of dnf — the RPM package manager used on Fedora and RHEL — written in C and aimed mostly at Docker containers.

  77. 80

    twinkleplop

    238pngwn/twinkleplop · TypeScript

    Twinkleplop is a small, fast syntax highlighter and code authoring toolkit for the web: you install just the languages you need, generate HTML or tokens from your code, and style the output with CSS.

  78. 81

    hyalite--liquid-glass

    236VII-Cae/hyalite--liquid-glass · JavaScript

    Hyalite is a JavaScript library that gives HTML elements real refraction — a 'liquid glass' look computed from the element's exact size and corner radii, not a static blur.

  79. 82

    Omarchy-Spotify

    234stappmus/Omarchy-Spotify · QML

    Omarchy Spotify is a lightweight Spotify client built specifically for the Omarchy Linux desktop, running inside Quickshell instead of a Chromium-based wrapper so it uses far less memory than the official desktop app.

  80. 83

    oryx

    157wmahfoudh/oryx · Rust

    Oryx is a fast, native desktop app for reading and writing markdown, with code editing, ebook and comic viewing, and PDF export, built for Linux, Windows and macOS.

  81. 84

    turbocrypt

    129jedisct1/turbocrypt · Zig

    TurboCrypt is a fast, easy-to-use command-line tool that encrypts and decrypts files, Git repositories, and directory trees — from a single document to a whole directory of backups.

  82. 85

    SolidityScanLegend

    118whitakeroliver/SolidityScanLegend · PHP

    SolidityScanLegend is described as a tool for real-time, high-performance data extraction and analysis built on a scalable, auto-scaling architecture with efficient query processing.

  83. 86

    Chat_UI

    111KODAMA-TECHNOLOGY/Chat_UI

    ChatUI is a minimal LLM chat client made of just two files (a main HTML file and a config file) that together total under 100 KB, with zero dependencies, so it runs directly in any browser.

  84. 87

    awesome-efficient-devtools

    88ejboy/awesome-efficient-devtools

    A curated list of developer tools chosen for cutting overhead — compute, AI context and tokens, terminal noise, setup complexity, or workflow friction. It spans AI-context helpers, fast CLIs, lightweight monitoring, and environment managers.

Often tagged together