patrick-steele-idem/morphdom

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

3574 stars · 148 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

morphdom is a lightweight JavaScript library that efficiently morphs an existing real DOM node tree to match a target DOM tree with minimal changes, without requiring a virtual DOM. It preserves internal DOM state like scroll positions, input caret positions, and CSS transition states during updates.

Use cases

• update the DOM after rerendering a UI component without losing input focus or scroll position
• morph an existing DOM tree to match new HTML from any templating language
• apply minimal DOM patches instead of replacing innerHTML wholesale
• diff and patch the real DOM against a virtual DOM tree
• efficiently sync server-rendered HTML into a live page

When to choose

• you rerender HTML strings or templates and want minimal, state-preserving DOM updates
• you want DOM diffing without adopting a full virtual DOM framework
• your code manually manipulates the DOM and you need updates to stay compatible
• you need a small, fast, dependency-free browser library

When to avoid

• you are building a large app that benefits from a full framework with state management and components
• you need fine-grained reactive updates rather than full-tree rerendering
• you need to diff non-DOM data structures

Facets

library · maturity stable

ui-components frontend-framework web-development frontend developer-tools browser dom-diffing dom-patching no-virtual-dom rerendering lightweight nodejs

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