Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
A year ago, my co-founder launched Desktop Docs here on HN. It's a Mac app we built with Electron that uses CLIP embeddings to search photos and videos locally with natural language. We got positive feedback from HN and our first paying customers, but the app was almost 1GB and clunky to use. TLDR; rebuilding in Rust was the right move. So we rewrote the app with Rust and Tauri and here are the results: - App size is 83% smaller: 1GB → 172MB - DMG Installer is 70% smaller: 232MB → 69.5MB - Indexing files is faster: A 38-minute video now indexes in ~3 minutes instead of 10-14 minutes -…
Desktop Docs is a Mac application that searches through photos and videos stored locally using natural language queries powered by CLIP embeddings. The app was rebuilt from Electron to Rust and Tauri, resulting in… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hi, I'm a developer and first time i shipped the real product after observing the startups and indie hackers community for years. I had made so many useless apps [you should check my website https://ansh.life], but this time I built a very useful product that has a number of super easy-to-use tools in one app for video, music, and photo files. Users can compress, convert, resize, and do so much more with easy-to-use tools. Background: I developed a frame-by-frame video cropper to upload cropped landscape videos to Instagram Reels. However, it required FFmpeg, and as a noob video…
2025 · pimosa.app · its alternatives →
- 2
TinyFast▲319I am a developer. I have been building stuff for the last 13 years. One common challenge in all my projects is compressing assets to make them as small as possible. I used to end up using online compressors, but this has a lot of privacy concerns. So, I finally set down for couple of weeks and built this simple app. I can just drag and drop assets in it and it shrinks them. It currently supports around 25 file types. I built a lot of iOS apps but this is the first time building a macOS app, so any feedback is welcome.
2025 · tinyfast.app · its alternatives →
- 3
I released a new version of Recut recently, rewritten from the ground up using Rust, Svelte, Tauri, TypeScript, and Tailwind (RUSTTT stack for the win!). It's the first app I've built with Tauri and I've really enjoyed it. Some back story: Recut is a tool I built to speed up my screencast editing workflow. It's like a lightweight single-purpose video editor. It chops out the pauses, with some knobs to tweak how closely it cuts and what it leaves in, and lets you get a live preview of what it'll look and sound like with the cuts applied. It can then export to a handful of other editors,…
2022 · getrecut.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Hi HN. I built Payload to make file transfers easy for less-technical users who need large/fast transfers, so I have focused on auto-discovery, drag-and-drop, visually distinct device icons. It's using Tauri (an "Electron alternative" built on Rust) which keeps my binaries small and bundles to .msi, .dmg, .deb and .appimage. No CLI, iOS or Android support (yet). The network stack is a separate binary written in Go. It uses mDNS for local network discovery and TLS over TCP or Quic, with a public Ed25519 keypair for each device. The protocol is ad-hoc and symmetrical control stream using…
2022 · payload.app · its alternatives →
- 5
HNSW implementation in Rust. Reference: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1603/1603.09320.pdf - swapneel/hnsw-rust
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Hey HN! I'm excited to share a tool I've been working on - a native Hacker News reader built with Rust and egui. Here's a screenshot: https://github.com/haojiang99/hacker_news_reader/blob/main/s.... As a daily HN reader, I've always struggled with keeping track of interesting posts I want to read later. Browser tabs pile up, bookmarks get forgotten, and I lose track of what I've already read. I needed a way to: 1. Browse HN efficiently (across all sections - hot, new, show, ask, jobs, best) 2. Quickly mark posts as "todo" for later reading 3. Mark posts as…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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layer▲88I built a small CLI called layer. It manages .git/info/exclude so you can keep local-only files in a repo without adding them to the shared .gitignore. This came from a normal team repo problem. People keep their own local files in a repo: API_SPEC.md, BACKEND_GUIDE.md, ARCHITECTURE_NOTES.md, CLAUDE.md, prompt files, scratch notes, temporary investigation docs, and other markdown files with custom names that are useful for one developer but should not be committed. The usual answer is “just put it in .gitignore”, but that gets messy fast because these files are different for each…
Mar 2026 · crates.io · its alternatives →
- 8FP
https://shelf-bookmarks.stupidlabs.lol I have been using raindrop.io for years now, and it has worked perfectly for me. Seriously, no issues. But, bookmarks are something that are a bit too personal... they allow profiling you. And I don't want anyone doing that to me, Hence, this app. It's 100% offline and free. It's built in Rust using Tauri, is roughly 6MB only, is beautiful to look at, and packs more features than commercial ones. Make sure to checkout the "All features" page as well from the homepage. Also, it has an inbuilt api server (configurable) so you can automate as…
Aug 2026 · its alternatives →
- 9
A little toy HN client for the desktop that I've been playing around with this week.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Hello! I got quite some feedback on a web server I'm building, so I'm rewriting the server to be faster and easier to use. I (and maybe some other contributors?) have optimized the web server performance, especially for static file serving and reverse proxying (the last use case I optimized for very recently). I also picked a different configuration format and specification, what I believe is easier to write. Automatic TLS is also enabled by default out of the box, you don't need to even enable it manually, like it was in the original server I was building. Yesterday, I released the first…
2025 · ferron.sh · its alternatives →
- 11
My Downloads folder had been left unkept for a really long time and cleaning it up using Finder was quite cumbersome. So I started creating a simple app to help me filter out and delete or move the files in the folder. It started out very basic and the filtering options genuinely helped me clean out the Downloads folder, then as I thought of more features I would like to see in a file manager I started to add them. Some of the features are: - Fuzzy go to folder/file where you only need to write a few letters of a full path, get suggestions and can jump to the correct path instantly -…
Jul 2026 · whimfiles.com · its alternatives →
- 12
This is my first major OSS release! I was always so frustrated by how slow image viewers were on Windows so I built one from the ground up with Rust & Tauri v2.0! Electro also has a very unique feature: a built-in terminal. I was always mesmerised by merging CLI tools with GUI based systems and this is my first go at it! I have big plans on expanding the terminal functionality with built-in image editing commands, command chaining, file handling etc.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Rerun 0.21 comes with a new graph viewer that's written in Rust and runs in the browser via wasm. It's powered by a new force based layout engine that is a port of much of d3-force to Rust. (The release also contains some other cool stuff like undo/redo implemented on top of a timeseries DB.) We built this with applications in robotics and spatial computing in mind but would love to hear feedback from folks that would see this as useful in other domains as well.
2024 · rerun.io · its alternatives →
- 14
This is a mac app that supports local media indexing, text-to-audio transcription, and video-to-text generation with VEO 3.1 The app runs offline and lets you index local and external drives without needing to upload your content to the cloud. To use VEO you'll need an internet connection and your own API key. We're only supporting Silicon Macs right now, but would consider Intel and Windows releases if there's interest. Price is $19.99 for a lifetime license that includes future updates. If you have any feedback or want to join our discord, drop me a comment. Demo:…
2025 · meetcosmos.com · its alternatives →
- 15
I built tinykv because I kept reaching for simple persistent storage in Rust projects but found existing solutions either too complex (sled) or unmaintained (pickledb). tinykv focuses on simplicity: JSON-based, serde-powered, with optional TTL. Perfect for CLI tools, game saves, config storage. Would appreciate any feedback from the HN community!
2025 · crates.io · its alternatives →
- 16RW
Hi HN, I'm Holger, a developer who worked in the lighting industry. I built this to scratch my own itch and put it on crates.io and PyPI where nothing like it existed. The old file formats (EULUMDAT from 1990, IES from 1991) still work fine for basic photometry. But the industry is moving toward spectral data – full wavelength distributions instead of just lumen values. The new standards (TM-33, ATLA-S001) are barely supported by existing tools. So this handles both: legacy formats for compatibility, spectral data for anyone who wants to work with the new standards. Stack: Rust core, then…
Dec 2025 · eulumdat.icu · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, My friend Sam and I were bored one weekend, and wanted to make something self-contained but still useful. We ended up with Victor [0], a vector database designed to run in the browser. It’s written in Rust, which gives us access to things like super-fast and compact serialization and deserialization, but it’s compiled to WASM and uses web-sys to interact with the browser’s JS APIs to write the database contents to disk. We worked hard on designing it in a way that makes sense for the browser. It uses the private origin file system [1] and stores the vectors in a compact format (one…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
crates.io serves as a central registry for sharing crates, which are packages or libraries written in Rust that you can use to enhance your projects
Jul 2026 · crates.io · its alternatives →
- 19EM
Yesterday I decided I wanted to experiment with different ways of reading HN. After considering a few options, I settled on a Mac app and spent a couple of hours planning/sketching on paper. This morning I fired up Xcode and spent 4 hours hacking away and I must say I'm liking how it's looking. Since the project is in its very early stages, I though that it could be a very good time to get some feedback. I've posted a few screenshots at http://imgur.com/a/rCbVN and uploaded a binary at http://abra.rm-fr.net/~fiam/HackerNews.zip If you have some free time, give a try and let me know what you…
2011 · imgur.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Another HackerNews command-line client. Contribute to scastiel/hn development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Personal Cloud Storage and File Management Solution with Privacy and Security - doshareme/desktop
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hi HN, I'm new to Rust and, after half of `The Rust Programming Language` I decided to delve into a project I would actually use: a markdown to html compiler that actually serves my micro-blog (I started just right after publishing the project hehe). The project is intentionally small and one-file contained: I wanted to have the full picture in mind. I'm open to comments, suggestions and PRs. If you asked me more convincing arguments to "why did you do it?" rather than "to learn Rust" I would respond with: LLMs are effectively a new type of web users today and will be more and more present…
Jul 2026 · andreadimatteo.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Disclaimer: I am no Rust expert. This project is completely vibe coded out of my frustration with Wordpress and the need for a secure (and free) CMS with a decent page builder. Whatever you do, don’t turn on acid mode in the container settings.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I built Rudoc because I wanted a smaller tool for simple file convertion workflow. (Pandoc was so heavy for me) I once wanted to try Pandoc, but after I downloaded it from GitHub, I found that it is around 70 MB. It also needed a lot of dependencies. Rudoc is not a substitue of Pandoc, it supports limited set of formats (only txt, md, html, typ, docx, pdf, pptx, xml, json) and doesn't support advanced formatting. The most common workflow is just turn a markdown file to a html. PDF generation can work without Typst, but PDF input conversion requires Typst as a backend. It has no other runtime…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- I completed shipping my desktop app alternatives
- TinyFast alternatives
- Recut automatically removes silence from videos – built with Tauri alternatives
- Payload – Cross-platform desktop app for LAN file transfers alternatives
- A fast HNSW implementation in Rust alternatives
- A native Hacker News reader with integrated todo/done tracking alternatives
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 →