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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

IM

24 alternatives to I made a browser TUI with its own layout engine

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.

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

  1. 1YW

    Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. This is a real TUI browser rendering the web as ANSI with its own layout engine. The backend is Google cloud run, running browserbox and the Krnl TUI browser and it is routed through a simple SSH server endpoint. 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,…

    Jul 2026 · its alternatives →

  2. 2MS

    linkrdr (www.linkrdr.com), a personal link aggregator, was directly inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555923 I read while browsing on HN. It's still a bit rough, but the concept is an interesting one and people have already shown interest. Let me know what you think. Also, if anyone knows a good UX designer, email me :)

    2012 · its alternatives →

  3. 3E

    Hello everyone, A couple of months ago I was introduced to Excalidraw and fell in love with it instantly. The only thing I didn't like was that I couldn't easily save my whiteboards and had to put everything in one whiteboard which started to lag my PC after a while. So I made ExcaliHub. It's exactly as it sounds: a hub for Excalidraw. It's free, open source, and I aim to keep it that way. Thanks in advance for any feedback!

    2024 · excalihub.dev · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon

    2024 · kopage.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    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 →

  6. 6MP

    My first "real" web app! I appreciate any comments/suggestions.<p>Also I am available for hire. Contact me at www.sambolgert.com

    2012 · se.cret.ly · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    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 →

  9. 9CP

    Hi hackers, long time reader, first time "real" submitter. This is by no means a revolutionary idea, or even execution, but rather something I've always wanted to do, just to see if I could write a good implementation of it. So without further adieu: http://ca.pitali.st/ Yes, it's just an URL shortener. Please check out the API and if there anything you like about it, please share, so I can take this feedback with me to my future projects. If there's something you REALLY hate, that's feedback too. Don't be afraid to hurt my feelings; this was put together in less than 4 hours to see if I…

    2011 · ca.pitali.st · its alternatives →

  10. 10WV

    Hey everyone, my friend and I created a GitHub Wrapped video for developers to showcase their activity on the platform in a more fun way. The implementation is open-source (https://github.com/rendleyhq/github-wrapped-2024) if you're interested in how it was built. To get a bit geeky, we used masks, keyframe animations, luma key shaders to remove the background from the confetti video, and some other techniques. Also, everything is rendered directly in the browser!! I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the rendering performance, especially if you're running this on your…

    2024 · rendley.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11TW

    A few weeks ago I posted my solo browser projects and since I have received lots of messages asking the download link. I was a bit reluctant to release it since it's not at a stable level yet. However I finally decided to just put it out there as a pre-alpha since so many emails I have received. So now you can grab this pre-alpha from https://code.intellios.ai/cwbrowser/ Note: Expect bugs, missing features, and crashes. Plenty of the web will render imperfectly or not at all. This is an early look, not a daily driver.

    Aug 2026 · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    This is a model I’ve been thinking about lately. It demonstrates a pattern that I’m wondering could exist, where terminal applications, BBS-style shared user boards, and other expressions of creativity and sharing are created with web technologies but rendered into the terminal and accessed over SSH. I like that this brings back some kind of old days of the internet feeling and uses web technologies but sidesteps the public World Wide Web, even though it’s still on the internet. You can try it out too right now, and I’m thinking about making the self-hosting specialized applications part a…

    Jul 2026 · duetbrowser.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13TO

    LégalEd for the Masses Title links to actual app Here is the demo video to show you around the interface Self funded on scraps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIwsPz0mKAU

    2025 · labs.sunami.ai · its alternatives →

  14. 142M

    Made this to try out o1-preview, took ~40 prompts and 3 hours in total, with a fairly solid backed written in Go. Works pretty badly in Firefox apparently due to canvas-canvas copies being really slow, Chrome works great tho. Doesn't work well on mobile yet, and has some other minor issues, but overall it feels incredible to put together something like this so quickly.

    2024 · chess280.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15BI

    Just wanted to share my latest project Taskstax, it's just a simple Kanban kind of trello clone, built mainly for the learns, but it works too so it's online. Simple Kanban boards, easy login that takes you straight to it. It uses socket.io for data xfer after login which was fun to setup and also makes it work well. Totally free, any feedback would be cool or if you wanted some info on the tech just ask.

    2025 · taskstax.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hey any astrophysicist reading hn there? Was sick in august (yeah isn't that nice) and made a small python fits table viewer for the terminal with textual. It would be great to have people try it so if you find any issue I can improve it. If you have no FITS file but would like to try regardless there are some test file in `/test`. Ciao!

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17YA

    Features: 1. Simple 2. No back-end framework like beego, gin, etc 3. Without ORM 4. CSR only Hope to get your feedback, Address: https://github.com/godiscourse/godiscourse

    2019 · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi HN! In the last couple of weeks I've been working on Cranki: Cranki = Crosswords + Anki. (It's a stupid name tbh, haha) I like doing crosswords in Spanish (to learn vocab) but none of the apps out there allowed me to use my own list of words that I come across. So I built one instead. It's entirely client-side. No server, no database, no accounts, etc. Your words and stats are stored in local storage. I built this for myself but let me know if you like it!

    Apr 2026 · cranki.app · its alternatives →

  19. 19AF

    Another Sunday afternoon project: add some pizzaz to your boring bare metal or virtual machine consoles! Written as a single Go binary; no dependencies. https://github.com/Fusion/modernfbv As usual, feedback please!

    2022 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    I couldn't find a CMS that met all my needs, so I built this prototype. It works for my purposes. I'm curious if anyone else finds it interesting or useful. If there's enough interest, I may continue working on it. Feedback welcome!

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Would love to hear your feedback! It's 100% free. :-)

    2024 · wizardshot.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hey HN! I develop browser extensions, I suck at web design, and I've been exploring AI/LLMs. With my new found free-time since dropping work hours, I've developed a Design Copilot browser extension [0]. It does what it says on the tin - you choose a part of your website and the tool gives you instant expert design feedback - "change this font to that, add this much whitespace, use brighter colours .... etc" The tool is completely 100% free to use, its powered by bringing your own AI API Key, and the current LLM it uses is Google Gemini 1.5 Pro. I've yet to hit the free rate-limit and I…

    2024 · old.reddit.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23YA

    Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38037180, this is done sort of as a learning journey since I've never built an app from scratch using Next.js and tailwindcss before. This is done over 2 days so it's quite bare in terms of features i.e. read-only but I would still like to share this project. Let me know what you guys think and feel free to provide any feedback!

    2023 · hackernews-next-wilsonoh.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    I was debating when to post this, but I've been using it locally in a variety of situations for several months and I think it's pretty stable (and usable!). There are more features I'd like to add, but I wanted to see if there was much interest before spending much more time on it right now.

    2025 · github.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 →