nowfound

Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to A)I updated my vimrc

I have been a devoted vim user for almost 3 decades and frankly it has served me well! Yes I do get tempted to try out the next best thing (though Zed has some serious names so am even more tempted). But frankly something about staying in the terminal that I am just too used to and dont want to change. Though I never bothered updating the vimrc often (did 4 "major" updates in those years) I found myself wanting to update my vimrc for vimspector. This time instead of again trying to understand vimscript and reading the various docs, I let claude code on it and dang it has been a fun journey…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1IM

    So, I'm learning VIM and made this yesterday, I pretend to increment it as I learn new stuff. You move with HJKL and that's it for now. Don't let the sublimes consume you. http://worms.io/vimwarrior/

    2016 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hey show HN! This course came about as a result of wanting a more targeted way of practicing using new vim commands I wanted to pick up, rather than just trying to use them in my regular code editing sessions. When I would try to use new commands during code editing, my productivity took a hit because I was trying to do two different things at once: thinking about code vs practicing my muscle memory. So, I made a separate environment for practicing, one that had an interactive editor, progress tracking, and achievement goals to let me see which areas I should work on, like speed and…

    2022 · vimified.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    So, I've never written a line of Rust in my life. I wouldn't know an `&mut this` from a mutandis. But I saw a tweet about a month ago that said, in this new era of AI, you'd be able to just take a library that you love, throw a TUI around it, and call it an app. So I spent about 200 bucks last month, here's what I came up with: Imbolc is a DAW that runs entirely in your terminal. It talks to scsynth over OSC and ships 58 instruments and 39 effects. VSTs are a work in progress, also GarageBand loops if you want to recreate "Umbrella". The codebase is about 60k? lines of Rust across 5 crates,…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4AU

    So we have had quiet the journey here. So 70 days ago (aka 73 turns ago) I posted on HN sharing our FreeCiv deployment (https://github.com/ndroo/freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info). FreeCiv is a great game, the clients is very buggy however. I'm using the GTK4 version, but a few others have opted for the QT variant. At some point, we might turn our focus to contributing to improving the client based on our experiences playing the game. We've since added a lot of little fun features: - The editor: you can write to the newspaper Editor and they /might/ publish what you…

    May 2026 · freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info · its alternatives →

  5. 5VI

    This was submitted before but it didn't seem to get much attention because I don't think the title was very descriptive and the submitter was brand new. I almost didn't click it but once I did I thought the project was pretty awesome and had a lot of promise. Hope this doesn't violate the rules, I have no horse in the game, but the creator is here on the site so hopefully he'll be able to answer your questions.

    2022 · docs.vaxiin.io · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    VSCode was my daily driver for years, but once I started running several coding agents across multiple projects at the same time, it got in the way. One workspace with terminals in the bottom tray, no idea which agent was doing what and I found myself needing all the code editing tools less and less. So I built my own IDE around that workflow. Terminals are a first-class citizen, every project stays alive in the background with visual statuses. Close the workspace and come back weeks later, everything is still in its place. I've been using it for weeks and it's a big productivity boost. The…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Fully leaned into vibe coding this time around. Started on v0, at some point ejected into running locally (getting v0's exported folder to run locally was a challenge), then iterated with Cursor over the course of a few hours. Really neat how much can be accomplished just conversationally these days.

    2025 · macrodata-refinement.arjit.me · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hey HN. I've become enamored with the Acme editor. It's fascinating because it turns the Vim paradigm on its head: instead of maximizing your use of the keyboard, maximize your use of the mouse. I think this helps optimize for information management, as opposed to text manipulation. I realized a lot of the CLIs I use have the same structure, and with a small program I could convert them into GUIs inside Acme and make them much easier to use. Let me know what you think.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hey HN! Last week I was working on a website and needed a way to synchronise visuals with live music. I've used MIDI controllers for this before, but I am travelling right now and don't have mine with me. So I had the crazy idea to build a browser extension that uses the keyboard as input and includes a sequencer. I gave myself 24 to work on it. It ended up taking longer (of course), specially since I ended up creating a demo, a small landing, docs, and an intro video. Took me one week from idea to launch (pushed quite a bit tbh). Features: - Works as a browser extension. Atm distributed…

    2024 · minitap.io · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11LU

    hello! After receiving some great traction here a few weeks back (65.03k unique visitors/ 539.22k total requests/ +11x user sign ups), Stephen and I rolled up our sleeves and made some improvements based on the feedback y'all had. → Migrated the entire infrastructure from Heroku to DigitalOcean w/ Docker → Added functionality for data exports to markdown (take your data anywhere) → Added in a sustainability model with Lemon Squeezy subscription payments → Migrated to a Vite-based build system → Migrated from vuex to pinia for Vue.js state management → Made improvements to the…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  12. 12A2

    Hey Hacker News, I have finished this after 2 months and made the entire thing free (up to 2 projects) for you all to try out, all you need is an account. Thansk and enjoy, Dan

    2024 · flourishfreelance.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    I recently encountered a situation where JetBrains IDEs weren't working for a project, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to keep paying the yearly fee. I decided to de-IDE myself and as part of it I decided to look at my options. The more I saw of Emacs the more interested I got. However using the Doom emacs distribution kind of threw me in the deep end without actually understanding how Emacs operates. I was lost and bounced off quick. I decided to take the approach of starting with vanilla Emacs and trying to get it to work for me as an IDE one step at a time. This post was me documenting…

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    After a year of producing all my code through Claude Code, I was growing frustrated with losing Terminal tabs and not noticing when sessions are ready to continue. I looked around at all the terminal managers people have been building for this type of workflow and couldn't find anything that worked for me. Cmux came close but was too buggy in the area I cared the most about: knowing when my sessions are ready for input. I also felt like the sidebar was too cluttered and hard to parse visually. So, I made my own Claude-first terminal manager and optimized it for the habits I've developed over…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    I participated in the Nvidia + Vercel 2 hour hackathon in SF tonight, and built something I've wanted, but hadn't tried building. I implemented an MCP Server and VS Code extension to allow Claude Desktop to place breakpoints, step through code, and execute expressions (assuming language support). So you can ask it a question that requires actually stepping through the code and now it can actually do that - check values for you, etc. It's _definitely_ not perfect. Have improvements? Please make a PR!

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16VA

    https://github.com/iogf/vy

    2017 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    I explored how I can use AI when writing software beyond code completion, and I didn't like any of the UX I saw (maybe except Cursor). Well, I do all my work in vim. Claude knows how to use vim! And... you can do anything(!) from vim. Turns out, embedding Claude in vim means you get a fully agentic AI pair programmer in <1000 LoC. (See the GitHub README for examples of what "fully agentic" means.) And if you have some semantic vim tools (jedi.vim, eclim, ...) set up, Claude could use them if instructed. Unlike CLIs, you can review Claude's changes, and keep the chat history. So an editor…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Saw the remotion claude skills launch earlier, and honestly even though I was surprised how decent some of the results turned out to be I ended up never trying it out with claude code because I knew I'd have to setup remotion, bundler etc and if I was already doing it once I thought I might as well turn it into a site where anyone could just write messages and get a video without any prerequisites. I also know Claude Code is not something everyone has and setting up remotion is a pain. And one of the biggest lessons I learned from this whole experience is that Opus is actually not that good…

    Feb 2026 · framecall.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19IM

    I'm documenting everything about my process. From learning to code, to building the app, and all the way to my outreach efforts. I'm learning as I go and sharing it with everyone who's not a programer, and is daunted to build a software on their own. Trust me. If I can do it, anyone can! You can find my updates on: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Claritask.com ...as well as video updates on https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCdmqmifW4kIcPclXigay1dQ Would love to hear your feedback on my progress and if you have any suggestions on what I can do better. There's so many task managers out…

    2017 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hi HN! I've never posted anything on here before, but this project was too fun to pass up. I've been learning a lot about agents lately, and wanted to see if I could replicate some of the results of Windsurf and Cursor. Generally I love these tools, but when you're stuck behind an "enterprise" firewall, they don't work as well. This sad state of affairs motivated me to understand SWE agents more. Does it work? Yes. Is it as good as Cursor and Windsurf? Not quite, but it's pretty darn close, depending on the model you use. I'm lacking a few features like semantic indexing, MCP support, but…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I made this because I was using SuperTab and noticed that it uses a lot more code when I wanted something really simple: for Vim to intelligently choose what to autocomplete for me. Maybe it has more features but to me, it tried to do too much in a single plugin. So my goal here was to made a dead-simple, minimalistic Tab completion plugin. It does this with less than 60 lines of source code, compared to around 800 for Supertab. I hope you like it as much as I do.

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Just wanted to make my first post about something interesting I've been working on for some time. Any ideas&#x2F;suggestions for new hardware or software I should try out are welcome, though I will only have time for a major overhaul in a month or two where I want to redo and document everything a bit better than how it is currently. Hope this can inspire someone to start their own homelab or give some ideas to already existing ones!

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I was going through my app subscriptions and realized I was paying $15 for a pretty good workout app, which seemed a bit high to me. As a software engineer who is also well versed in claude code, I realized that I could likely vibecode a very similar app, or even build something more to my liking. I challenged my self to build something roughly equivalent this afternoon. Workflow was: start with a detailed spec from Claude code describing many of the features common in workout apps. Then paste this into lovable to have it build out the initial mvp. Once that was built, I used claude code…

    Dec 2025 · strengthquest.lovable.app · its alternatives →

  24. 24HT

    Fun little project, had Gemini 2.5 Pro summarize HN's top 30 each hour, both the stories and comment sections. Pretty impressed with Gemini 2.5. It's probably the first model other than Claude 3.7 Sonnet where I actually find the output readable. I normally use 3.7 Sonnet for coding, but used Gemini for the codegen on this one as well. Was pretty impressed! Using Cursor, it seemed to instruction-follow better than Claude generally does, and remain lucid during very long agent sessions. Thanks for your feedback!

    2025 · tinysums.ai · its alternatives →

Also compare

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 →