nowfound

Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to An interactive physics simulator with 1000’s of balls, in your terminal

A colorful interactive physics simulator with thousands of balls, but in your terminal! - minimaxir/ballin

An interactive physics simulator that runs in the terminal, capable of displaying and animating thousands of balls simultaneously. It's designed for developers who want to explore physics simulations or visualize… 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

    Had some fun with shared array buffers over many months of free time. Skip to the end to play around with the final app. Open to ideas on how to simulate more whilst staying in js land.

    2024 · dgerrells.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2A2

    2017 · htmlpreview.github.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    80x23 terminal tetris! Contribute to taylorconor/tinytetris development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
  5. 5
    Imajourn▲160

    We are now on the Apple App Store with multiple new features

    Dec 2025 · imajourn.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    MiniMax H3 is a multimodal AI video generator that turns text, images, video clips, and audio into coherent cinematic videos with native stereo sound. It lets you mix up to 12 references in one pass, maintain character and style consistency, and perform precise instruction-based

    Jul 2026 · minimax.io · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Boson X▲71

    Fast-paced rotational runner set in a particle accelerator

    2015 · boson-x.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Highly addictive detector simulation game from CERN

    2014 · particle-clicker.web.cern.ch · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    An infinite runner in your terminal. Contribute to smallhadroncollider/ascii-runner development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    I started teaching my daughter physics by showing her how things actually work - plucking guitar strings to explain vibration, mixing paints to understand light, dropping objects to see gravity in action. She learned so much faster through hands-on exploration than through books or videos. That's when I realized: what if I could recreate these physical experiments as interactive simulations? Lumen is the result - an interactive physics playground covering sound, light, motion, life, and mechanics. Each module lets you manipulate variables in real-time and see/hear the results…

    Jan 2026 · projectlumen.app · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    A 2D rigid-body dynamics simulator with some cool features for generating beautiful animations. - diegomacario/Dyna-Kinematics

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi all This has been my hobby project for quite a few years now It started as a small engine to serve as a sandbox to try out new 3d graphics ideas After adding many features through out the years and re-writing the entire engine a few times, this is the latest state It currently supports loading models with animations, textures, lights, shadow maps, normal maps, and some other goodies I've also recently added voxel raymarching as an alternative renderer, along with a fun physics simulation :)

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey HN! We are the co-founders of Elodin (https://elodin.systems/), a code-first physics simulation framework. We just open-sourced our core libraries on Github: https://github.com/elodin-sys/elodin Have you ever wondered what happens when a satellite is first placed into orbit? It turns out that often, they tumble out of control, end over end, in a miraculous fight against stability. Check out our demo here of a control system attempting to rectify this: https://app.elodin.systems/sandbox/hn/cube-sat The spacecraft does not…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi HN, I’m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game. Here's a simple runthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-moBz6upU. I pushed to get through a full product pathway to show the V-804 replay. I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied…

    Mar 2026 · fuelingcuriosity.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15AS

    I really like the look of the famous album art for Unknown Pleasures [1]. It was originally created by Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory from the signals of the first discovered radio pulsar [2]. I made a spectrogram that produces a similar look. It runs FFT in Rust and visualizes it with WebGL. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnknownPleasuresVinyl.jpg [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1919%2B21

    2024 · aestuans.github.io · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Build apps, research deeply and automate multi-step tasks

    Mar 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    SimPhy▲83

    Physics and math simulator for teachers and students

    2021 · simphy.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Particle accelleration with OpenGL 4.3, using the compute shader to calculate particle movement on graphics hardware. - MauriceGit/Partikel_accelleration_on_GPU

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Terminal based bit manipulator in ncurses. Contribute to mellowcandle/bitwise development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Desktop AI workstation with agent-driven visual canvas

    May 2026 · hub.minimax.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    💫 Beautiful spinners for terminal, IPython and Jupyter - manrajgrover/halo

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Interactive physics textbook with AR

    2020 · vividbooks.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    A very fast and scalable physics engine, based on Box2D. - mtsamis/box2d-optimized

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    A pretty simple but fun to play with simulator for a concept from mathematical physics called the "2D Coulomb gas". I originally made this for my Bachelor's thesis to create pretty pictures and build intuition but have recently gotten it a fresh coat of paint and better performance curtesy of WebGPU acceleration (ported with liberal help from Codex to get through all of the boilerplate). Play around with it - hopefully read up more on the 2D Coulomb gas because it is an incredibly deep topic research wise.

    Feb 2026 · simonhalvdansson.github.io · 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 →