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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to A backend agnostic Ruby framework for building reactive desktop apps

For a year or two I've been building a UI library with the aim of making desktop applications fun and easy to write. It is currently written in C/Ruby and uses a custom tree sitter grammar to describe templates. Features include: composable UI components, template directives, event and prop handling, slots, styles and automation capabilities baked in. One of the goals of the project is privileging easy to write custom components via a drawing API over providing a fixed set of components. At the time of this writing it should install on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but sometimes it is hard…

Hokusai is a Ruby framework for building reactive desktop applications that work across Windows, Mac, and Linux. It provides composable UI components, template directives, event handling, slots, and styling… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1
    21st.dev▲1,211

    I originally built this app to organize and reuse interesting React + Tailwind components I came across on Twitter, inspired by the shadcn/ui approach. Later, a friend started contributing their own components, and it got me thinking—this could grow into something bigger, like an NPM for design engineers to share and use components. Would love to hear your thoughts!

    2025 · 21st.dev · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hi HN! I was super frustrated at apps like tiktok and wechat preventing me from saving or downloading the animated gifs, so I made a little tool to turn a screen recording into a slack-sized emoji. Hope you get some value from this!

    Jun 2026 · vorpus.github.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    The shadcn/ui component library for building AI-native apps

    2025 · elements.ai-sdk.dev · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Kombai▲1,079

    A new AI model that you can prompt with UI designs

    2023 · kombai.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    ReactAI▲440

    Open source free AI react components builder

    2024 · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    Subframe▲756

    The best way to build UI, fast

    2024 · subframe.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Atomic▲444

    The fastest way to design beautiful interactions

    2015 · atomic.io · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Slint is a declarative GUI toolkit written primarily in Rust, with API support for multiple programming languages such as C++ and JavaScript. It is designed for desktop and embedded usage. The Slint website has just been redesigned. And we added a new Royalty-Free License option besides GPL and commercial

    2023 · slint.dev · its alternatives →

  9. 9BP

    Fir leverages Golang’s standard library html/template package and a bit of alpinejs to allow building reactive UIs. You start with plain old html and use alpinejs to enhance it to bring no-page-reload interactivity to web apps. The Fir toolkit is designed for Go developers with moderate html/css & js skills who want to progressively build reactive web apps without mastering complex web frameworks. It includes a Go library and an Alpine.js plugin. How it works ? On receiving user-interactions the fir server re-renders html templates and sends it over the wire where the fir client…

    2023 · livefir.fly.dev · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hi HN, I’m excited to share Spot, a simple, cross-platform, React-like GUI library for Go. It is just a few days old and has lots of missing features but I'm happy with the results so far, and looking for some design feedback. Spot is designed to be easy to use and provide a consistent API across different platforms (mainly Mac & Linux). It’s inspired by React, but written in Go, aiming to combine the best of both worlds: the easy tooling & performance of Go with a modern, reactive approach to UI development. Key features: - Cross-platform: Leveraging FLTK[1] & Cocoa[2], Spot works on Mac,…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11AA

    Yes, another reactive UI framework for JavaScript. Bear with me, please... :-) I 'invented' the concept for this back in 2011, and it was used (as a proprietary lib) in various startups. Even though many similar open source libs have been released since, and boy have I tried a lot of them, none have been able to capture the elegance and DX of what we had back then. I might be biased though. :-) So I started creating a cleaned-up, modern, TypeScript, open source implementation for the concept about five years ago. After many iterations, working on the project on and off, I'm finally happy…

    2025 · aberdeenjs.org · its alternatives →

  12. 12UG

    Hi all, I'm currently working on my hobby project, and one of the fun constraints I put in was to build using as less dependencies as possible. I chose Go as it has a really good standard library, and all went well for building backend. But for frontend, I was wondering whether I should break the constraint and go for React. I tried options like Web Components, but I really didn't like the ergonomics and I didn't want to use jQuery either. Out of curiosity, I was exploring Go's html/template package to see if I can write UIs in a React-like manner. I found most of the online docs using…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey HN, I’m Pierce. Today I’m open sourcing a beta of Mountaineer, an integrated framework for building webapps in React and Python. I’ve written a good 25+ webapps over the last few years in almost every major framework under the sun. Python and React remain my favorite. They let you get started quickly and grow to scale. But the developer experience of linking these two worlds remains less than optimal: — Sharing typehints and schemas across frontend and backend code — Scattered fetch() calls to template data and modify server objects — Server side rendering / gateway support — Error…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    A batteries-included Rust web framework built around a new programming model for composable, multi-target rendering.

    6d ago · proa.so · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hi there, Zero Stars here. I recently published some new work to Hokusai Pocket, which is a cross-platform binary made on top of raylib and MRuby that runs GUIs from ruby scripts. License? MIT! How does it work? The binary is available on the GitHub releases page: https://github.com/skinnyjames/hokusai-pocket/releases/tag/0... You can download the binary on x86 Windows, OSX, or Linux, and run your GUI application with hokusai-pocket run:target="" For a little bit of a hello world, I started a photoshop clone…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hello HN! The day has finally come to stop adding features and start sharing what I've been building the last 5-6 months. It's a bit of CrewAI, OpenDevon, LangFuse/Cloud all in one, providing devs who prefer TypeScript an integrated framework thats provides a lot out of the box to start experimenting and building agents with. It started after peeking at the LangChain docs a few times and never liking the example code. I began experimenting with automating a simple Jira request from the engineering team to add an index to one of our Google Spanner databases (for context I'm the…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    Artoo▲61

    Framework for physical devices written in Ruby

    2015 · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hey all! I've been using this stack personally for a while now and decided to automate it a bit by turning it into a template I can reuse. Hope others might find it helpful!

    2025 · bhvr.dev · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi everyone, I have been working on this for some time now and thought I should post it here. I have enjoyed working with React in the past, and I love Ruby, so I thought I'd implement something like React in Ruby, and this is the result. Components are written in Haml and transformed into Ruby. Everything runs on the server, and there's no need to write any JavaScript. It's pretty fast, and latency is usually low enough nowadays when you can deploy apps anywhere in the world. It might not be suitable for all types of web apps, but it might be perfect for some. One of the main benefits of…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    An opinionated, React-based design system for web and mobile

    2018 · oskrhq-ds.surge.sh · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Slint is a declarative GUI toolkit for Rust, C++, JavaScript & Python — build native UIs for embedded, desktop, and web from a single codebase.

    2020 · sixtyfps.io · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    A React Framework for building internal tools, admin panels, dashboards & B2B apps with unmatched flexibility. - refinedev/refine

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I've come to prefer modeling state machines with nested states, but implementing them by hand requires a large amount of error-prone boilerplate that obscures the important logic of the state machine. I found that the existing offerings in the Rust ecosystem - while inspiring - lacked a number of features that I was looking for, so I spent the last few months building moku. Feedback is welcome!

    2025 · docs.rs · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    A fast, native app for local coding agents. Amp, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Grok, and Pi — one timeline, entirely on your machine.

    Aug 2026 · waku.sh · its alternatives →

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