shimmer-text

A soft-blur front sweeps across your text, then settles into crisp type. One file, zero dependencies, 8 kB gzipped. The text stays selectable.

Live demo →

Install

npm install shimmer-text

Or drop it in — no build step, no JavaScript to write:

<h1 data-shimmer-text>Sound you can feel before you hear it.</h1>
<script type="module" src="https://offbr.co/tools/shimmer-text.js"></script>

Use

import { shimmerText } from "shimmer-text";

const hero = await shimmerText("#hero", { duration: 7200, intensity: 2 });
hero.replay();
hero.destroy();

import { ShimmerText } from "shimmer-text/react";

<ShimmerText as="h1" intensity={2}>
  Sound you can feel
</ShimmerText>;

React is an optional peer dependency — only the /react entry point pulls it in.

Options

| Option | Default | Meaning | | ----------- | ----------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------- | | target | "[data-shimmer-text]" | Selector, Element, or iterable of elements | | duration | 5600 | Sweep length in ms | | delay | 0 | Wait after the element enters the viewport | | stagger | 0 | Extra delay per element, in document order | | intensity | 1 | How pronounced — ~2 for a hero, ~0.7 for body copy | | colors | none | CSS colours the sweep front cycles through (up to 6) |

Each has a data-shimmer-* twin for the drop-in path, e.g. data-shimmer-intensity="2". Pair a loud heading with quiet body copy — everything at one intensity reads as a broken page.

Good to know

• Selectable. The real text sits under the canvas, transparent but live — highlight it, copy it, ⌘F it. Screen readers and crawlers read it normally.
• Cheap. Waits for the viewport, and the animation loop exits once everything has settled.
• Degrades twice. WebGL first, then a Canvas2D renderer, then plain static text under prefers-reduced-motion.
• Leaf elements only. The text is baked to a canvas, so child markup is flattened. Parents need overflow: visible — the blur bleeds past the glyphs.

Anything with <canvas> works; WebGL 1 for the good path.

License

MIT