Alternatives
Products that do what I Made Fleschkey – Non-AI Text Editor with Readability Insights does
Hello, HN! After weeks of being frustrated with bloated software and AI writing tools, I decided to make something different—something simpler. That's how I created Fleschkey, my privacy-first, AI-free text editor. Fleschkey is for writers who want their work to be clear. It gives instant feedback with a readability score based on the Flesch-Kincaid formula, made in 1975—a system that's been used in many ways since then. To me, privacy means more than opting in or out. It means no one can see or take your data unless there's a good reason. That’s why everything stays on your device—no cloud,…
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Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRFOWNpb3U4 Imagine having the CMD+K functionality of Cursor.sh but instead of code you edit natural language. *Introducing Fixkey:* - Native Swift macOS app (no Electron) - Keyboard-centric - Select common prompts with keyboard shortcuts - Press one shortcut to select and fix the current paragraph - Create custom prompts just in time - Works in every application on macOS (Apple Notes, Obsidian, Notion, Gmail, Slack…) - Support for local running models (Beta) *Why not using Grammarly?:* I always feel that traditional grammar correction…
2024 · fixkey.ai
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My personal itch to scratch just recently has been the umpteen formatting foibles of HackerNews. So, in the spirit of making the web more personal again, I knocked up a TamperMonkey userscript to fix up the worst of my personal bugbears. This isn't an attempt at a complete rebrand/redesign of the site, instead it's just fixing up what I think are the biggest design/readability issues whilst trying to remain true to the site's existing aesthetic. Key features: * Base font size increased * A little more room around headings * Top menu bar is full-width and with a little more padding…
2022 · github.com
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I blew off a bunch of "serious" side work last month and built a tiny little embeddable editing tool that I've wanted to have for Ars Technica since, well, the beginning of internet time. It lets any random user make edit suggestions for writers/editors to consider and act on. I think it's pretty cool and it's gotten some good use over the last few weeks. Of note, it's uses a single-field signup form. Edit administration is currently email based, so all it needs is an email address to get people going. I'm sure I'm not the only person to ever do this, but I basically just turned it on one…
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I can't say "I created a tool" because obviously I only had an idea, then asked Cursor to implement it and 15 minutes later it was ready ;) Often I found I was manually replacing em dashes with hyphens in AI-generated text before I use them in copy, PR descriptions etc. It still feels like a shame to flare the text "you wrote" was not really human made. To automate these removals, here it is: super tiny online page. I made it for myself, but whoever wants, you can use it as well. I am not going to monetize it or promote more than this post.
May 2026 · undsh.com
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Over the last couple of months I have designed and written Keys, a Mac application the helps learning typing and that is supposed to meet Mac users standards for a well-designed application. My goal is to become a micro-ISV or indie developer. The app is only in the Mac app store for now (no trial yet), since end of May, and I have been busy putting together a website and a personal blog since. I would be very interested what the HN community thinks about the application, how you like it, and how it is presented, from a business angle. Prior to this project, I have done much more work on…
2012
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As a high school student, I love LLMs and the execution of Apple's Appel Intelligence Writing Tools, but was disappointed that nothing like that existed for Windows. So, I created Writing Tools, a better than Apple Intelligence open-source alternative that works system-wide on Windows! Key features: - Uses Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash model for superior AI-assisted writing (much better than the tiny 2B parameter Apple Intelligence model) - Works in any application with a customizable hotkey - Proofreads, rewrites, summarizes, and more - Free and privacy-focused (your API key stays local, no…
2024 · github.com
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I have tried journaling many times but nothing stuck. So I decided to make my own app for myself with these features: * Voice first * Private first * AI chat * Automatic tagging, meaning extraction, and semantic retrieval using embeddings stored locally * Export to LLM the AI angle is especially interesting for me. It allows me to ask questions like: * "remind me highlights and crazy nights in the last 3 months" * "How was I feeling during my trip in Spain and how big of a problem was my breakup" * "How would you judge my overall interactions with Marc after I told him about my problems" the…
Jul 2026 · echologue.com
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Hi HN, I'm one of the creators of Nanobrowser, an open-source Chrome extension that lets you automate web tasks using AI agents. We were inspired by the potential of tools like OpenAI's Operator, but we wanted something that was: -Open-Source:You can see the code, modify it, and contribute to the project. -Browser-Based:No complex setups or server deployments. It runs directly in your browser. -Customizable:You can tailor the agent's behavior to your specific needs. -BYO LLM:Bring your own large language model API key (OpenAI, Anthropic,or even local models), No vendor lock-in. -Privacy…
2025 · github.com
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I posted this previously, but there's been a major update. As a high school student, I love LLMs and the execution of Apple's Appel Intelligence Writing Tools, but was disappointed that nothing like that existed for Windows. I thus created Writing Tools, a better than Apple Intelligence open-source alternative that works system-wide on Windows. It's much better than the tiny 2B parameter Apple Intelligence model! Features (works system-wide): 1. Select text in a textbox, press the hotkey, and optimise your text in a click (proofread, rewrite, tone changes, custom instructions...). You can…
2024 · github.com
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2022 · freewriterai.com
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I've been wondering how I could use LLMs to help me write, without taking my own voice away. I arrived at a workflow where the AI has strict instructions not to give me any text, just to give me tips, but it was clunky to see which parts of the text the critique referred to. To solve it, I made Lucid. I made it mostly for myself, but I added a "bring your own key" system for others to use it. I hope you like it!
May 2026 · writelucid.cc
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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
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Apple has quietly shipped a pretty complete on-device AI stack into macOS, with these features first getting API access in MacOS 26. There are multiple components in the foundation model, but the skills it shipped with actually make this ~3b parameter model useful. The API to hit the model is super easy, and no one is really wiring them together yet. - Foundation Models (macOS 26) - a ~3B-parameter LLM with an API. Streaming, structured output, tool use. No API key, no cloud call, no per-token cost. - NLContextualEmbedding (Natural Language framework, macOS 14+) -- a BERT-style 512-dim text…
Apr 2026 · cyberwriter.app
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Hey HN! While writing prompts for a few projects recently, a couple of friends and I realised that writing prompts today is like writing code in a txt file - it sucks and there is no tooling to help you. So we decided to hack on a tool to help you fix this - https://optimist.varied.ai/ It is literally a hack rn but we already find it useful for writing prompts. That said we'd love to talk to folks who are writing serious prompts everyday and see how the product can be better. Also the only reason the waitlist is there, is running this is super expensive like $100/day for…
2023 · optimist.varied.ai
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I made EchoStash. If you’ve ever written a great prompt, used it once, and then couldn’t find it again — I’ve been there too. I kept losing my best prompts in chats, notes, or random documents. Every time I started a new project, I ended up rewriting the same stuff or wasting time trying to remember where I saved things. So I built EchoStash — a simple tool for developers who use AI tools regularly. It helps you save, organize, and reuse your prompts. You can tag them by project or tool, and when you need something, just search. The cool part? EchoStash has AI-powered search. You don’t need…
2025 · echostash.app
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Secure browser-native AI to write documents instantly
Jun 2026 · freedocumentmaker.com
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10+ privacy-first text tools that never touch a server
Aug 2026 · editlyapp.com
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Hey Hacker News! I built Writekin over the past week because I was tired of AI writing that didn't sound like me, even though I had just used AI to clean it up, rather than wholesale write it. The usual fixes I found online for this were: - Some sort of SKILL.md, or - A system prompt full of rules to strip the generic AI tells (e.g. no em-dashes, none of the stock phrases, varying the sentence length, etc). While those cleaned up the surface a bit, Pangram still came back as ~100% AI written, which was frustrating, as again it was mainly taking my sloppy copy and tweaking it. So when…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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