Alternatives
Products that do what My Emacs Zero to IDE Journey does
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…
- 1TI
Hey HN, Small OSS project that i created for myself and want to share with the community. It's a declarative, scriptable, terminal-based IDE focussed on agentic engineering. That's a lot of jargon, but essentially its a multi-agent IDE that you start in your terminal. Why is that relevant? Thanks to tmux and SSH, it means that you have a really simple and efficient way to create your own always-on coding setup. Boot into your IDE through ssh, give a prompt to claude and close off your machine. In tmux-ide claude will keep working. The tool is intentionally really lightweight, because I think…
Mar 2026 · tmux.thijsverreck.com
- 2CF
Hi HN! Since launching Continue two months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882146), we've received amazing feedback, added features, and greatly improved reliability. But one of the biggest things we heard was the desire for a JetBrains extension. My co-founder Ty and I are super excited to share that we've released an extension for PyCharm, Intellij, WebStorm, and most other JetBrains IDEs - ready for alpha users at https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22707-continue. Perhaps the most exciting part is that this effort was kickstarted and in…
2023 · plugins.jetbrains.com
- 3MA
I've been exploring the (not so=) amazing potential of AI in coding and have compiled a list of tools. From AI-powered IDEs to code generators, this resource is my contribution to the community. I'm still on the fence about including txt2sql projects, as their functionality seems too basic to me. And I'm personally maintaining this, so your feedback is wellcome.
2025 · aicode.danvoronov.com
- 4MF
Hi, I'm Will. I'm 24, autistic, and have OCD tendencies. I'm learning to code and this is my first public project. I’d really appreciate your feedback and encouragement! This project lets me solve some of my OCD problems online. There are a couple of parts of the forums that I visit – Space Battles, Sufficient Velocity, and Questionable Questing – that I want to remove. Specifically, I hate seeing indicators of how much is left in a forum thread, because I keep thinking about how much content is left. It stops me from immersing myself in the story. It stressed me out. Before I learned to…
2024 · github.com
- 5AC
I’ve spent the last ~2 years building a C/C++ IDE for Windows entirely in C99. My goal was to eliminate the bloat of the modern Visual Studio environment keeping its core features. Key Technical Highlights: Zero Dependencies: Just the Windows API Performance: Starts in 0.1ms on a twelve year old machine. It handles projects with 500k+ lines without UI lag or indexing stutters. Integrated Tools: Includes a custom-built debugger, profiler, and Intellisense engine designed for speed. Portability: It’s a single executable. No installer required. I built this because I was tired of waiting…
Mar 2026 · giovannicarlino04.itch.io
- 6IV
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
- 7MS
Hello HN community ! Finally I have a "Show HN" post. I'm bootstrapping my first Mac app, it's a standalone Xdebug PHP debugger. It aims to help any PHP developers out there who don't want to use IDE to debug code. My app it's slimmer, faster to load and easy to work and setup :) Hope you guys like it Site: http://codebugapp.com/
2012
- 8EA
Hi HN, I’m building an agentic IDE for hardware developers. It currently supports Arduino, ESP32, ESP8266, and a bunch of other boards (mostly hobbyist for now, but expanding to things like PlatformIO). It can already write and debug hardware projects end-to-end on its own. The goal is to have it also generate breadboard views (Fritzing-style), PCB layouts, and schematics. Basically a generative EDA tool. Right now, it’s already a better drop-in replacement for the Arduino IDE. Would love feedback from folks here.
2025 · embedr.app
- 9IB
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
- 10AA
I’ve had this idea for a new code editor chord grammar bouncing around in my head for over 2 years, and now I can finally release v0.1 of ane. You can run it one-shot from scripts or agents (`ane exec —chord…`) or use its full-on TUI editor. ane is pure Rust, and integrates tree-sitter and LSP to provide a pleasant and predictable terminal code editing experience. I’d love folks to try it out and give feedback! Thanks :)
May 2026 · github.com
- 11DM
I have been coding over four decades, in many languages, on many projects (including Firefox, Final Cut Pro, the Newton, and Fullwrite Professional if you can remember that far back; all these using my "dead-name"). I wrote something small and simple to scratch an itch. It's the UNIX philosophy: small "one-trick ponies", each *really* good at their one trick, then the user can hook them together to solve actual problems. I'm a CLI guy, and for almost everything, I already have this. But not for debugging. The itch I scratched was the connector that enables this philosophy for debugging. That…
Jun 2026
- 12IM
This is a personal project I've been working on and off for the past few years. It's a set of tools that have allowed me to prototype quickly small (and increasingly bigger) kernels, and create userspace programs to interact with them. Supports riscv64, amd64 and i386. The intel port has been tested and used on real hardware, from big dual-socket Xeon machines to an old X220. It is all C, I have plan to make rust bindings for the kernel library. But again, they're plans at this stage. Porting to new architectures is relatively simple, a basic port to riscv took me a couple of weeks of…
2024 · github.com
- 13
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
- 14
Cause "You're absolutely right" is probably absolutely wrong
Apr 2026 · npmjs.com
- 15ND
Hi HN, I'm happy to finally ship my first development project: http://favsi.com. Favsi is a site to share lists of random stuff. Things you probably wouldn't post anywhere else. Like: • Favorite cheesy ninja movies • Favorite original NES games • Favorite songs to sing in the car There's been lots of list-type apps cropping up lately: Bagcheck, ListGeeks, Listry, and probably others. Mini-trend? Some Background: By trade, I've been mostly a business guy [shudders] at startups, but have been working to change that for awhile now. I started learning Ruby a few times last year but had trouble…
2011
- 16KY
Hey HN! I wanted to practice "vibe coding" and see how far and fast I can go by only prompting, without actual coding. I decided to make a simple CLI app that scrapes web docs into a single md file (I was annoyed that LLM keeps writing Tailwind 3 code for a Tailwind 4 project). In just a couple of hours, the CLI app was ready! Then iterated on arguments for another couple of hours. Result: https://github.com/vladstudio/web2llm Then I decided to go further and "productize" the CLI by making a web app for it. Another half-day, and the web app is ready!…
2025 · web2llm.dev
- 17VI
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
- 18EC
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
- 19BT
Hi everybody, this was my project to learn Zig and RISC-V+x86_64 assembly. Not sure if anybody is actually interested in yet another Brainfuck compiler, so I'll just write up some random things I learned while building it! - A primitive assembly stitching compiler is 10x faster than the interpreter. Did not expect that. - The generated x86 code is really bad (e.g. it always uses 6 or 7 byte sized instructions with 32-bit immediates when there are much smaller ones) but it doesn't really matter. Good code generated by GCC and clang for transpiled Brainfuck->C is not much faster as it's…
2025 · github.com
- 20SC
Sometimes, I come across a handy tool or a frustrating issue in my daily workflow. If it's both, I might write a small program in a language I’m comfortable with to solve it. Except for ELisp... For some reason, it annoyed me so much that I couldn't stop writing in it. First, it was simple config tweaks, then small patches, and before I knew it, I was enjoying it. I ended up creating a few packages, and of course, with each one, I’d hit a new problem, push the old one aside, and start fresh. Just hoping I don’t forget to go back to it later. Well, I didn't and I'm slowly revisiting,…
2024
- 21MF
HN, I would appreciate some feedback on my first coding project ever. It's a visual instant search for iTunes (using Apple's API) I consider it MVP at this point, some features are still missing. I've tested the site in Safari, IE, and Firefox, and it seems to work in all of them. http://38069.vs.webtropia.com/tester/test/ (not too fancy of a URL) My background is nowhere near coding or designing (English major in the making, quite sure my code shows) and I only knew some basic PHP going into this last week, so don't be too harsh. Why this idea? I strongly believe visual search will be…
2011
- 22CT
I built CodeBeam to solve two core developer frustrations: constant context-switching between browser and IDE, and the tedious process of dealing with errors across different languages and frameworks. What makes CodeBeam different is its universal adaptability. It watches your clipboard with customizable directives for automatic file operations, while simultaneously monitoring your logs for errors using pattern-based detection that works with any language or framework. When it spots an error, it automatically generates AI-ready prompts with rich context, making debugging significantly…
2025 · github.com
- 23LA
Hello HN, I am building a devtool to understand existing codebases. The idea originates from my time at big tech as well as various attempts to get involved in open source projects. When I was in college I wanted to improve my coding skills by contributing to opensource projects. I would pickup a bug or feature request but I always found myself stuck at the very first step. I did not understood where and how to begin contributing. I once submitted a patch in firefox which was labeled "Good first issue" but that was still very handheld. The assigner told me exactly which files I need to…
2024 · lucidcode.ai
- 24UA
I've been using LLMs for long discovery and research chats (papers, repos, best practices), then distilling that into phased markdown (build plan + tests), then handing those phases to Codex/Claude to implement and test phase by phase. The annoying part was always the distillation and keeping docs and architecture current, so I built Unpack: a lightweight GitHub template plus docs structure and a few commands that turns conversations into phases/specs and keeps project docs up to date as the agent builds. It can also generate Mintlify-friendly end-user docs. There are other…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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