anywhen — dates & times: Dates and times the way your reader expects them: written out, shortened, or just 3 hours ago.

anywhen
▸about anywhen

Formats a date as the string a reader expects — "yesterday, 2:35 PM", "3 hours ago", "5 Feb 2016" — choosing the form from how far away the date is.

wraps
Intl.DateTimeFormat + Intl.RelativeTimeFormat
install
npm install anywhen
runtime
Node 18+, every modern browser, Deno, Bun, edge runtimes.
docs
anyfamily.site/docs/anywhen
playground
run the family on StackBlitz

why

Relative time by hand is a threshold table plus a per-locale plural mess; dayjs and date-fns ship locale files and a hundred functions to get one string. anywhen is one call, ~1.4 kB, every locale the runtime knows, and SSR-stable when you pin `now`.

usage

anywhen(date)                                        // "yesterday, 2:35 PM"
anywhen(date, { mode: "relative" })                  // "3 hours ago"
anywhen(date, { mode: "absolute", locale: "ja" })    // "2016年2月5日"
anywhen(date, { locale: "en", now: requestTime })    // SSR-safe: fixed anchor
anywhen.parts(date, { mode: "relative" })            // [{ type: "integer", value: "3", unit: "hour" }, …]
anywhen.range(from, to, { format: { day: "numeric", month: "short" } }) // "Sep 12 – 15"

not for

Parsing dates, date arithmetic, or custom pattern strings like DD/MM/YYYY — use a date library for those and hand the result here.