snowpack VS remark

Once you build a simple Vite backend integration, try not to complicate Vite's configuration unless you absolutely must. Vite has become one of the most popular bundlers in the frontend space, but it wasn't the first and it certainly won't be the last. In my 7 years of building for the web, I've used Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, esbuild, and Parcel. Snowpack and Rome came-and-went before I ever had a chance to try them. Bun is vying for the spot of The New Hotness in bundling, Rome has been forked into Biome, and Vercel is building a Rust-based Webpack alternative.

Additional features for Bun include a transpiler and package manager. As hinted at in the name, it also includes bundling features, giving you the functionality that would otherwise require another tool, such as Snowpack or rollup.js. It also has a dead code elimination feature through its JavaScript minifier.

Even, there are several bundling tools available, including popular ones like Webpack and Snowpack.

once upon a time there was this thing called Snowpack: https://www.snowpack.devwhich had a lot of promises as vite (rollup w/ esm). So I migrated a project over from CRA to this thing.While startup speed was much much faster, it actually didn't make the app useable. I timed it meticulously for both CRA and snowpack build and found that the TTI was almost identical. I am not claiming the same to be vite but it's possible and I don't have a large app to prove it..

Snowpack.

> special snowflake build toolchains

That reminds me, wasn't there a build tool called Snowflake?

Oh, it was called Snowpack [1]. And it's no longer being actively maintained. Yeesh.

[1]: https://www.snowpack.dev/

Snowpack app - a single HTML page with Snowpack configuration

The first thing we need is a JavaScript project for our app. We'll use Snowpack as our bundler. Open a terminal located in a directory for the project and type npx create-snowpack-app react-couchdb --template @snowpack/app-template-minimal. Snowpack will create a skeleton for our React application and install all dependencies. Once it's done doing its job, type cd react-couchdb to get into the newly created project directory. create-snowpack-app is very similar to create-react-app in how it sets-up your project, but it's a lot less intrusive (You don't even need to use eject at any point).

Snowpack appears to be no longer maintained.

Before you get too deep into Snowpack, be aware that they recommend using other tools now because it’s no longer maintained.

I also didn't try this tool but it's called RemarkJS which is named too similar to revealjs.

remark. Primarily, this is a linter for Markdown. Additionally, thanks to its numerous plugins, it allows us to perform additional checks for grammatical mistakes within the content itself. Before using this linter, our content was not scrutinized to this extent.

Rehype and Remark are plugins used to transform and manipulate the HTML and Markdown content of a website, helping to enhance its functionality and appearance.

I usually combine remark-parse, remark-rehype and rehype-react to transform markdown into react components. The configuration of the processor is like:

Astro content collection are as simple as a folder containing a bunch of Markdown (or Markdoc or MDX) files if that's the only thing you need, but they can also do relationship matching between different collections, frontmatter validation using zod and you can also customize how the markdown is parsed and translated to html using rehype and remark and their plugin ecosystem.

On my personal blog I have few external links in my posts. I wanted to keep people on my website by applying target="_blank" on external (those what don't reference to my site) links. This is a common and good practice too. I write my content in Markdown, so I decided to write a remark plugin. It is simple to implement, just few lines of code.

Although we are building a custom table of contents, we won't have to write everything from scratch. To separate the Markdown/MDX content from the front matter, we'll use the Gray-matter package. It is optional in case you don't have front matter in your Markdown files. To process the Markdown itself, we'll use the Remark package. We'll also need the unist-util-visit package for traversing node trees and mdast-util-to-string for getting the text content of a node.

That's all to render the post as HTML, there are lots of things you can do to customize the results, you can check the remark plugins and rehype plugins to pass as props to and you can also take a look at some other bloggers if you're looking for different styles for example Lee Robinson's or if you liked mine.

contentlayer uses remark to parse the markdown in an mdast. We can now use remark plugins to modify the mdast. Then rehype comes into play and converts the mdast into a hast. rehype plugins can now modify the hast. Finally the hast is converted into react components.

Now we have our Cloudinary account set up, we can use it with Docusaurus. To do so, we need to create a remark plugin. This is a plugin for the remark markdown processor. It's a plugin that will transform the markdown image syntax into a Cloudinary URL.