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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Run GUIs as Scripts

Hi there, Zero Stars here. I recently published some new work to Hokusai Pocket, which is a cross-platform binary made on top of raylib and MRuby that runs GUIs from ruby scripts. License? MIT! How does it work? The binary is available on the GitHub releases page: https://github.com/skinnyjames/hokusai-pocket/releases/tag/0... You can download the binary on x86 Windows, OSX, or Linux, and run your GUI application with hokusai-pocket run:target="" For a little bit of a hello world, I started a photoshop clone…

Hokusai Pocket is a cross-platform binary that enables developers to build and run graphical user interfaces using Ruby scripts. Built on raylib and MRuby, it works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Users write GUI… 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

    Run KolibriOS, Linux or Windows 98 in your browser

    2013 · copy.sh · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    I made a built-from scratch Wayland Compositor to display any GUI app* in the terminal! I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in custom Wayland compositors, a lot of really cool things you can embed existing applications into! So, I started with embedding apps into the terminal because that is the easiest input/output (output is just utf-8 and I use the great `chafa` library for that, and I just read from stdin for the input). If you have any other ideas for cool Wayland compositors, let me know. I purposedly wrote 80% the app in Typescript to appeal to the most developers and…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    For a year or two I've been building a UI library with the aim of making desktop applications fun and easy to write. It is currently written in C/Ruby and uses a custom tree sitter grammar to describe templates. Features include: composable UI components, template directives, event and prop handling, slots, styles and automation capabilities baked in. One of the goals of the project is privileging easy to write custom components via a drawing API over providing a fixed set of components. At the time of this writing it should install on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but sometimes it is hard…

    2025 · codeberg.org · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Not sure if I would post this for the last day of #marchintosh OR wait for tomorrow the 1st of April. Both apply equally. Anyway, here's a pet project of mine, I made it as a glued on for another pet project of mine, but it developed a life of it's own now and can soar skyward toward success, fame, and glory.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi HN, I’m excited to share Spot, a simple, cross-platform, React-like GUI library for Go. It is just a few days old and has lots of missing features but I'm happy with the results so far, and looking for some design feedback. Spot is designed to be easy to use and provide a consistent API across different platforms (mainly Mac & Linux). It’s inspired by React, but written in Go, aiming to combine the best of both worlds: the easy tooling & performance of Go with a modern, reactive approach to UI development. Key features: - Cross-platform: Leveraging FLTK[1] & Cocoa[2], Spot works on Mac,…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Userspace macOS translation layer for Linux ARM64. Contribute to wie-project/kakehashi development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Hey all, I am Paul, an indie-dev, I am working on this web based Drag and drop GUI builder tool for python. It's still in beta and currently supports tkinter and customtk. It can generate clean code python for the UI you build. You can check out the source code here: https://github.com/PaulleDemon/PyUIBuilder Feel free to check it out. Thanks!

    2025 · pyuibuilder.com · its alternatives →

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    Run WebAssembly made for outside the browser, inside the browser.

    2022 · runno.dev · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    OpenUI▲322

    Thesys just open-sourced their generative UI rendering engine. Interesting timing given where Google a2ui and Vercel's json-render are headed. The difference worth noting: a2ui and json-render both treat JSONL as the contract between the LLM and the renderer. Thesys is betting that's the wrong primitive. Their engine uses a code-like syntax (OpenUI Lang) instead — LLM writes it, renderer executes it. The argument is that LLMs are fundamentally better at generating code than generating structured data, so you get cleaner output and ~67% fewer tokens. The broader vision seems to be a…

    Mar 2026 · openui.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Create Python GUIs with Qt in minutes. Contribute to mherrmann/fbs development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Hey HN, I’m Jimmy, co-founder of Dropbase (https://www.dropbase.io). We are an internal tools builder for Python developers. All you have to do is import any Python scripts/libraries, declare UI components, and layer app permissions so you can share them with others. We’re a middle ground between Airplane and Retool—simpler UI creation than Airplane, more code-centered than Retool. UI building is declarative and you can bind Python scripts/functions to UI components. You can write Python scripts/functions using our App Studio with support from a Python Language…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Run Claude, Codex & Copilot directly in GitHub & VS Code

    Feb 2026 · github.blog · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Open-source alternative to Codex & Claude Code

    May 2026 · shiori.ai · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Run AI agents like Claude Code, Codex, Opencode on mobile

    Dec 2025 · vibepocket.com · its alternatives →

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    Linux virtual machine, running in the browser via HTML5/WebAssembly. Networking and graphics supported.

    2021 · repl.leaningtech.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Control your computer using natural language

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    No gc, No goroutines, Produces small binaries while using the unmodified official go toolchain, and comes with complete Web SDK (generated from w3c/webref). We are building `pcz` to provide a reimagination of Go the language, in an effort to make it suitable for all kinds of programming tasks, and currently you can use it to build efficient web applications in Go using the generated Web SDK (as shown with the live web demo[1]). The journey is just starting, any suggestions? or any critics? [1]: https://primecitizens.github.io/livedemos/10-plat-web/

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Go based GUI framework: practical, immediate mode, flexbox model - hasenj/go-shirei

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Hi everyone, Gridland is a runtime + ShadCN UI registry that makes it possible to build terminal apps that run in the browser as well as the native terminal. This is useful for demoing TUIs so that users know what they're getting before they are invested enough to install them. And, tbh, it's also just super fun! Gridland is the successor to Ink Web (ink-web.dev) which is the same concept, but using Ink + xterm.js. After building Ink Web, we continued experimenting and found that using OpenTUI and a canvas renderer performed better with less flickering and nearly instant load times. We're…

    Mar 2026 · gridland.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Libretto (https://libretto.sh) is a Skill+CLI that makes it easy for your coding agent to generate deterministic browser automations and debug existing ones. Key shift is going from “give an agent a prompt at runtime and hope it figures things out” to: “Use coding agents to generate real scripts you can inspect, run, and debug”. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cDpIntmHAM. Docs start at https://libretto.sh/docs/get-started/introduction. We spent a year building and maintaining browser automations for EHR and payer portal…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hello HN, Just wanted to show this little 2D game engine that I've been working on for some time (around 2 years on the editor part, longer on some of the components). It's quite full featured but obviously this a project of such magnitude already that the work never really ends. That being said it's definitely already at a point where games can made and published. The editor runs natively on Windows and Linux using Qt5. The games can run on both Win and Linux as well as on WASM with WebGL. Feature wise there's a bunch of the stuff you'd expect. Audio, graphics, scripting,…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I have been working on Dear ImGui Bundle since 2022, but it is the first time I talk about it here. It is a framework around Dear ImGui for building interactive applications in Python and C++. It comes with batteries included: Plotting, image inspection, Markdown, node editors, 3D gizmos, knobs, toggles, etc. https://imgui-bundle.pages.dev It now also runs smoothly in the browser via pyodide: The playground below is a python app running in your browser (no server, no JavaScript). You can edit the code on the left and click Run. It even works on mobile.…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    I've created a GitHub Action for running commands on multiple platforms. This includes platforms that GitHub Actions don't natively support. It currently supports FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. OpenBSD can run on x86-64 and ARM64, the other operating systems run on x86-64. Some of the features that are supported include: * Multiple operating system with one single action * Multiple versions of each operating system * Allows to use default shell or Bash shell * Low boot overhead * Fast execution * Runs on both macOS and Linux runners Compared to similar solutions like…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

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