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Comment by lobstrosity420 | Hacker News Reader

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lobstrosity420

You can do

const $ = document.querySelector;

$('.elements').style.color = 'red';

Which is only marginally more verbose.

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No you can't. $('.elements') in jQuery is more equivalent to querySelectorAll('.elements').

You can however do:

document.querySelectorAll('a').forEach(a => a.style.color = 'red')

This is the only post that I see so far that touches on the real innovation and unique value of jQuery: operating on groups. Everybody can go ahead and tell me that using a forEach every time is trivial, or that I can just insert some transpiler step in my build pipeline to take advantage of X language's convenient syntax, but the bottom line is that people use jQuery because it continues to be easier. Thank you for your insight and great design sense John Resig! Still not bested after 15 years.

Though your alias definition needs a little extra, or the function loses its context and colling it will just result ":

  const $ = document.querySelector.bind(document);

or slightly less efficient, wrap in a function:

  const $ = function(x) { return document.querySelector(x) };

or if you want to be concise and don't need to support legacy IE:

  const $ = (x) => document.querySelector(x);

(and as pointed out already, you need querySelectorAll() and a loop for what jQuery does by default, though your example will work for a single element)

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