snarkdown: The 1KB Markdown Renderer That Does Just Enough

I want to share a tiny markdown library I found: snarkdown. It’s 1KB and does just enough.

Most projects reach for Marked (50KB) or markdown-it (100KB). For displaying blog post summaries or user comments, you don’t need full CommonMark compliance. You need bold, italic, links, lists, code blocks. That’s it.

snarkdown is 1KB and renders exactly that.

What It Does (and Doesn’t)

Supports: bold, italic, strikethrough, links, lists, code blocks, headers. The basics.

**bold** and _italic_
[link](https://example.com)
`code`

- list item

# heading

Doesn’t support: tables, images, footnotes, reference-style links. If you need those, use Marked. If you don’t, why ship 50KB?

How to Use It

One function. Input markdown, get HTML:

import snarkdown from "https://esm.sh/snarkdown@2.0.0";

const markdown = "**Bold** and *italic* with [links](https://example.com)";
const html = snarkdown(markdown);

Load from CDN, no build step. Here’s how I use it in my newsletter digester:

import snarkdown from "https://esm.sh/snarkdown@2.0.0";

export default function Posts() {
  return html`
    <div dangerouslySetInnerHTML=${{ __html: snarkdown(post.summary) }} />
  `;
}

AI-generated summaries come back with basic markdown. snarkdown renders them instantly.

My total frontend: Preact (3KB) + HTM (1KB) + snarkdown (1KB) = 5KB. Compare that to React + markdown-it = 275KB.

See it in action: github.com/mfyz/newsletter-blog-digester - check src/public/pages/Posts.js. One line of code. That’s it.