jquery.verticalScroll.js: a love letter to jQuery, written ten years later

There’s a moment every developer has had. You’re browsing a website — usually Apple’s — and something scrolls so smoothly that your brain short-circuits from “wow, that’s beautiful” to “I bet I could build that” in under three seconds.

For me, it was Apple’s iPhone launch page. Full-screen sections. Buttery vertical scroll. Pagination dots on the side like a quiet tour guide. I stared at it the way a dog stares at a squirrel.

And then I did what any reasonable developer would do in 2016: I opened a file, typed $.fn.verticalScroll = function(), and started building a jQuery plugin.

Ten years later, I’m still maintaining it. It has 13 pagination themes, 16 animations, TypeScript support, visual regression tests, and a documentation site. It also has zero GitHub stars. Not one. Not even from me.

This is the story of a plugin that nobody asked for, nobody uses, and I absolutely refuse to let die.

The project I can’t remember building it for

Here’s the thing about personal projects from a decade ago: I genuinely cannot tell you what I originally built this for. I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast. What I do remember is the feeling — I wanted full-page vertical scrolling in my next project, fullpage.js existed but I wanted my own, and jQuery was the hammer that fit every nail in 2016.

So I built it. A lightweight plugin — pass it a container with <section> elements, call .verticalScroll(), and suddenly your page moves like an Apple keynote. Mouse wheel, keyboard arrows, touch swipe. Pagination dots that actually knew which section you were on.

It worked. I used it. I loved it. And then I had the thought that turns a weekend hack into a ten-year commitment:

“This should be open source.”

Zero stars, zero promotion, zero shame

Let’s talk about the elephant in the repo: zero GitHub stars.

Ten years. Not a single star. And I’ve never once been tempted to log into an alt account and give myself one. My philosophy is simple — if someone actually likes it, they’ll speak out. Spread the word, don’t manufacture it.

Is it a little absurd to maintain a jQuery plugin for a decade with zero external validation? Absolutely. But there’s something honest about it. This project doesn’t exist to pad a resume or farm engagement. It exists because I built something, I liked it, and I wasn’t ready to let it rot.

Some developers have side projects with thousands of stars that they abandoned two months after launch. I have one with zero stars that I gave a TypeScript rewrite last week. I know which one I respect more.

Dressing a ten-year-old in a tuxedo

The original code was… let’s say “young.” If the first version was a newborn — tiny, adorable, running around naked and somehow still getting the job done — then what I’ve done over the years is slowly teach it table manners and put it in a suit.

The latest version? It’s wearing a tuxedo:

• 13 pagination themes — Neon, Git Graph, Chain, Diamond, and nine others. Each one with a custom animation that matches. Because if you’re going to have pagination dots, they should at least have personality.
• SCSS 7-1 architecture — because managing 13 themes in a single CSS file is a war crime.
• Playwright visual regression tests — every theme, every animation, pixel-checked. Because the one thing worse than a jQuery plugin nobody uses is a broken jQuery plugin nobody uses.
• Docsify documentation site — full API docs, examples, theme previews.
• Release-please automation — semantic versioning, changelogs, the works.
• v3 alpha: TypeScript + ESM — yes, a jQuery plugin with TypeScript types and ES module support. In 2026. I know how that sounds.

Is it overengineered for what it is? Probably. But here’s the thing — I didn’t add all of this at once. Each upgrade came from a genuine desire to do the thing properly. If I’m going to maintain something for a decade, it might as well be something I’m proud to open the source of.

Will this ever be anything other than a jQuery plugin?

Honestly? The odds that jquery.verticalScroll.js becomes react-vertical-scroll or @vue/vertical-scroll are roughly the same as the odds that it gets its first GitHub star: nonzero, but I’m not holding my breath.

The v3 TypeScript rewrite was a modernization experiment. A “what if” exercise. Could the core logic live outside jQuery? Could it become framework-agnostic? The answer is yes, technically. But “technically possible” and “something I’ll actually do” are two very different things in the side-project economy.

More likely, this plugin will get another quiet upgrade in 2036. jQuery 5 will exist by then (probably). I’ll add Web Component support or something. The star count will still be zero. And I’ll still be fine with that.

The point

Every developer has a project like this. The one that doesn’t make your portfolio shine. The one that nobody clones. The one that exists purely because you wanted it to exist, and you kept choosing to make it a little better instead of letting it decay.

jquery.verticalScroll.js is mine. Born because Apple made a pretty website and I had jQuery loaded. Raised through a decade of quiet commits. Dressed up in TypeScript because even old code deserves new clothes.

If you somehow find it, try it, and it saves you twenty minutes — that would genuinely make my day. And if you star it? Well. That would be a first.

Code: github.com/vineethkrishnan/jquery.verticalScroll.js