Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Runal – A text-based creative coding environment for the terminal
Hello HN! Just wanted to share a small project I've been working for the last few months. It's a tool called Runal, a text-based creative coding environment that runs in the terminal. It works similarly as processing or p5js but it does all the rendering as text. And it can either be scripted with JavaScript or used as a Go package. It's open-source and cross-platform (linux, macOS, windows). It seems to me that text/ascii-art aesthetics are really popular in creative coding communities, so I though it would make sense to create a tool that runs on a platform which can render text only.…
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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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 →
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Pts is a javascript library for visualization and creative-coding.
2018 · ptsjs.org · its alternatives →
- 4
Render▲318Hey HN, I'm Anurag, founder and CEO of Render, a cloud for application developers. We've just launched Render Workflows, a way to define durable tasks by decorating plain TypeScript or Python functions and running them on Render without operating queues, worker pools, retry logic, and state management. Code example below [1]. The use cases we have in mind include agent loops, ETL/data pipelines, billing flows, and other long-running jobs. The model is simple: mark an existing function as a Task, deploy the repo as a Workflow, then trigger runs from your application code or via our API.…
2019 · render.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Hyper 1.0.0▲413Terminal built and extensible with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
2016 · hyper.is · its alternatives →
- 6
:aquarius: A Lisp-esque, JS-interpreted scripting language - tsortwehttam/runiq
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN — I’m learning Rust and decided to build a universal CLI for running code in many languages. The tool, Run, aims to be a single, minimal dependency utility for: running one-off snippets (from CLI flags), running files, reading and executing piped stdin, and providing language-specific REPLs that you can switch between interactively. I designed it to support both interpreted languages (Python, JS, Ruby, etc.) and compiled languages (Rust, Go, C/C++). It detects languages from flags or file extensions, can compile temporary files for compiled languages, and exposes a unified REPL…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
(Obsolete) Archive of Rant 3.x. Contribute to TheBerkin/rant3 development by creating an account on GitHub.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
A terminal-based text editor written in Rust. Contribute to gchp/iota development by creating an account on GitHub.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
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 →
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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 →
- 13
Here's a project I've been working on for a little while now. Ripl is a JS library that provides a unified API for rendering shapes on both canvas and SVG interchangeably. Over the years I've used D3 extensively to create data visualisations so I figured I'd have a go at making my own version with a slightly more modern API and stricter TypeScript support. I am aware there are already libraries that can draw to multiple contexts interchangeably, but I've added a few little niceties to Ripl that (as far as I know) some other libraries don't have such as CSS-like query selectors, DOM-like…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
A cross platform package to do curses-like operations, plus higher level APIs and widgets to create text UIs and ASCII art animations - peterbrittain/asciimatics
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15AL
2013 · np-lang.org · its alternatives →
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Runabout▲90Instantly reproduce scenarios in your code
2023 · plugins.jetbrains.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Run WebAssembly made for outside the browser, inside the browser.
2022 · runno.dev · its alternatives →
- 18
Rayli▲120📸 Generate image of a code block right from the terminal
2022 · npmjs.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Print your name in style. Contribute to arsham/figurine development by creating an account on GitHub.
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
texts.run▲103A simple messenger-style webpage builder, with AI assist
2023 · texts.run · its alternatives →
- 21
Learn how Runme brings securely shareable GitHub Gists to your day-to-day DevOps workflows and documentation.
2024 · runme.dev · its alternatives →
- 22
After several years, with a small hiatus in the middle, I've finally got Ripl to the point of being published. Ripl is a library for rendering 2D and 3D shapes to any context (canvas, SVG, WebGPU, and Terminal supported by default) using a single API. The library mimics the DOM as much as possible, replicating the event system, object graphing, CSS-like querying, gradients, and keyframe animations etc. I also built a complete data visualization library using the core package which is available as @ripl/charts. And yes, you can even render the charts to a terminal with about a 2-3 line…
Mar 2026 · ripl.rocks · its alternatives →
- 23
Hello internet folks! I'm happy to share the first TestFlight release of Glyph3D, a 3D text visualizer for macOS and iOS. It's free, supports pretty much any utf8 data, and is a pretty interesting way to navigate your repositories or data directories without the limitations of standard text windows! Download and bookmark for macOS and iOS: https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat/ - You should be able to download public repos from GitHub and render them. - Play with opening and closing windows. I've disabled many of the in-flight features to keep user confusion down,…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi, I have created a terminal app for wordle that has web like experience. In particular, it has keyboard hints and guess reveal animations. The idea is to able to play wordle in the terminal offline (and continuously if needed). This is also kind of a Rust learning project for me, and my first public rust project. The terminal game is built with ratatui framework, which is great. I find it interesting that you can model a tui with `The Elm Architecture - TEA` principles for the terminal. Feedbacks are welcome, particularly if you are a wordle person. Have a nice day!
2024 · 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 →