Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A beautiful and local-first PDF reader for studying dense things
Recently, I found myself having to read the book "C++ primer" and I just couldn't do it. Maybe my attention span is too little now with Claude and Codex, maybe I'm lazy... but I just couldn't get myself to focus. While reading, I needed something to do. I wanted to talk to the text, I wanted to leave notes, I wanted to use to use my keyboard to quickly flip through pages. The only good available option on a Mac was "Preview" and it was ok, but definitely not there. So I built Quincy primarily for myself. With it you can - "Talk" to the page you're reading, create a quiz about the page, and…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
- 2
Not sure if I would post this for the last day of #marchintosh OR wait for tomorrow the 1st of April. Both apply equally. Anyway, here's a pet project of mine, I made it as a glued on for another pet project of mine, but it developed a life of it's own now and can soar skyward toward success, fame, and glory.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3AW
Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com · its alternatives →
- 4IB
Hey so I am making my own book reader and wanted to share it with y'all on hackernews and I saw a submission talking about DRM free books[0] so I decided to submit this submission on Hackernews to show what I am upto :-D I prefer minimalism so I have created three different flavors of it depending upon the particular use-cases and I have linked the most minimalist one as the submission. If someone is interested in a Epub/pdf reader, I have recently made one: https://epub.mirror.forum/ After making that, I was also feeling the need of having standard book downloads and…
Jun 2026 · epub.mirror.forum · its alternatives →
- 5
Hey yall, I built this for my makerspace. We wanted to let each other borrow things, but also didn't want to put up a big shiny sign saying "hey everyone, my garage has a super fancy oscilloscope just sitting there" and also didn't want to necessarily always need to say yes to everything. However, when I show it to people, they've been suggesting using it for other things like board games, or wedding equipment, etc. I'm still trying to find PMF, so please let me know what you think! For the stack, it's all Elixir + LiveView which is really nice, and then Fly.io, Fly's MPG, Tigris Data,…
Aug 2026 · toolpool.garden · its alternatives →
- 6CO
First tutorial to date. Writing your first C program, includes a link at the bottom with a detailed look at printf() as optional reading. I would love some feedback, as I intend writing up a lot of dev articles for people to learn from : www.xanthu.com/first-c-program
2013 · its alternatives →
- 7
Hey HN, I wrote a short book about the fundamental aspects of Clojure. The target audience is programmers with at least minimal experience who want to learn how to express solutions in Clojure (and perhaps in LISP, generally). If the price is a bit too steep for you, send me an email (address in bio), and I'll provide a discount coupon. If you can't afford it all, and believe the material may help you for studying or interview preparations, I can send you a free copy.
2025 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →
- 8IC
Hi HN! I've been tinkering on a programmatically controlled typewriter. I've got a working prototype and it's been a lot of fun to play with. Of course I connected it to ChatGPT so I can chat with it, and I also have it acting as a clock, but it doesn't just type out the time. It writes a poem about the time. I'm posting this to gauge interest in purchasing one. It's all handmade, so I can't scale it up, but if enough people are into it, I might make a small batch. Or maybe sell it as a kit for the DIY crowd. Anyway, just wanted to put it out there and see what you all think. Thanks for…
2024 · notes.bayesup.date · its alternatives →
- 9IB
I use AI while reading the Bible and I suspect others do too. It's helpful whether you're struggling with the Elizabethan English, or want added context/want to know what theologians say about a passage. So I thought, why not make the AI come to you? TIA for any feedback!
2025 · scripturia.com · its alternatives →
- 10AI
This is a first draft of an app that I am working on that is the "anti blinkist (the book summarization app)". I call it Augre (aug-ur - short for augmented reader) and the whole idea is that I want to immerse more, not less in a book. I want to dive deeper into the text, chat with others who are reading the book and get into delicious discussions. It's still early but here are a couple of features: 1. A really solid cross platform epub reader 2. Left sidebar which augments the reading experience with tables, images, maps (and other artifacts coming soon) 3. Book chat where you can chat with…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 11IR
I’ve been frustrated with PDFs and found arXiv HTML lacking, so I built a fully interactive paper reader. Features: • Hover references, citations, equations • Light/dark mode • Auto-generated dependency graphs for definitions/lemmas/theorems • Table of contents that syncs with scroll • Highlighting + annotations • “Copy raw LaTeX” anywhere Featured paper: Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners (Veo 3) https://www.sciencestack.ai/arxiv/2509.20328v2
Nov 2025 · sciencestack.ai · its alternatives →
- 12
After watching The Odyssey, I thought it would be cool to check out some scenes from the source in detail, but I don't have time to read the whole book. So I came up with a sort of zoom/microscope, that allows to see the whole book at a glance and then zoom in (by pinching) on the part I'm interested in. I can do so down to the actual source text and get the authentic feel the author intended, at the same time I better understand where am I in the text and also the character and places are clickable so I can quickly orient myself on the context. Moreover each character has relationships…
Aug 2026 · book.curiora.space · its alternatives →
- 13
Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Hi HN! I kept hearing about Lisp and why it was special but didn't have a great place to start. I wanted something self-contained that helped me develop intuition rather than fluency. My hope is this is helpful for casual programmers, professionals from other fields who interact with code, or engineers who haven't had much exposure to interpreters or compilers. Hope this helps anyone else who's curious about getting a sense of Lisp and what makes it special with a limited time investment! Feedback or other cool Lisp things welcome :)
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15IM
Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026 · its alternatives →
- 16FA
Made this app because I was tired of not knowing 50 words/book when I read in English. You can try it on the AppStore searching "Quicky app". For Android user please use the web mobile version at https://quicky.app/. The Desktop version has a shitty responsive design. IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are not French, you will want to tell you are to try the features of the app (sorry it's only in French though) I'd love to hear your feedback.
2019 · its alternatives →
- 17
I made this after seeing someone posit the idea online yesterday over lunch then spent some time refining it. So far it's pretty impressive IMO! Right now I am running Qwen3-30B-A3B on my 24gb unified memory m4 MacBook Pro at 50 tok/sec and this should definitely not be working for such a large model on my middling hardware. Things are detailed in the README to get up and running and DESIGN.md has details on all the choices and such made along the way.
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
- 19
I built Read Fast after realising I was saving hundreds of things to read and reading almost none of them. It automatically turns saved content into a scheduled briefing and sends it to my inbox at whatever time I choose. New version since last post actually allows you to bulk upload URLs. So you can just dump links here and Read Fast will scrape and brief for you. Great for actually reading the things I want to. Curious if that resonates with people?
Dec 2025 · read-fast.replit.app · its alternatives →
- 20IB
After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com · its alternatives →
- 21
This is a tool which lets you easily manage different versions of ideas, helpful for writing essays. I've found myself wanting this every single time I go through the drafting process when writing, and I've been frustrated every time I find myself accidentally working on an old draft just because there was a paragraph that I liked better. This solves it. I hope the community like this as much I enjoyed working on it! Note that it's currently a beta waitlist because there's some bugs with the undo/redo state management and so I want to dogfood it for a bit for reliability. It says April…
Mar 2026 · quillium.bryanhu.com · its alternatives →
- 22TA
I created this tool over the weekend because, as someone interested in AI and technology, I find many research papers on arXiv fascinating but often incredibly dense and difficult to understand due to the heavy jargon and technical language. I wanted to make these complex topics more accessible to laypeople like myself by converting the topics described in these papers into full-length books that break down key concepts, making cutting-edge research easier to grasp. You can think of it as generating prerequisite reading materials before being able to read the actual paper. Here are some…
2024 · instabooks.ai · its alternatives →
- 23AS
(it's naked and will stay naked for at least a week or two) There are stuff like Discord or Scribophile, which can provide good opportunites, but it's such a mess and sometimes it can be frustrating - for both parties. So, r/betareading is meant to become a platform for both parties to meet and exchange freely. I'll have more free time soon to work on the subreddit and promote it. Probably will add guidelines for both writers and beta-readers. Because a writer can name the genre of his text and his length, but beta-readers skills should be categorized and made public: from grammar to…
2019 · its alternatives →
- 24PR
Hey HN, I built a PDF reader that can generate interactive visualizations right inside the document. The goal is to reduce the “intuition gap” when reading dense papers: select a concept, click Visualize, and it tries to produce a solid visual interactive app where you can rotate/zoom/step through (not just a text explanation). Upload any PDF, select text, click Visualize. Demo (no signup): https://zerodistract.com/try/pdf/67cdee74-810b-4f1b-af7d-010... Product link: https://zerodistract.com I’d love feedback, especially on what feels useful vs.…
Feb 2026 · zerodistract.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →