Alternatives
Products that do what Runal – A text-based creative coding environment for the terminal does
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.…
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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
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Hey folks, I just wanted to share a quick script I threw together called notational ls. One of the big problems of any code base (or any filesystem) is that it's hard to tell what's what - folder and file names often trade brevity for clarity. So I thought about a version of `ls` that works like this: > nls web: Where python web server files are stored ad_hoc: One time scripts ios: Our IOS code images Adding descriptions is really easy too: > nls images Images SHARED between both ios and web web: Where python web server files are stored ad_hoc: One time scripts ios: Our IOS code…
2011
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eno [1] - A modern plaintext language w/ libraries [2] for JavaScript, Python, Ruby & soon more! We migrated a big relational research database to a file-based solution - requirements were: - Super fast and easy editability for users - Highest performance for parsing/validating >10K documents on every user change. Our trials with YAML/TOML showed us that we wanted something both faster [3][4] and easier [4], something tailored for file-based content management ... and after months of research & development it's now publicly available (under MIT license) for everyone! Last but…
2018
- 6RA
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
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2018 · amp.rs
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This is a model I’ve been thinking about lately. It demonstrates a pattern that I’m wondering could exist, where terminal applications, BBS-style shared user boards, and other expressions of creativity and sharing are created with web technologies but rendered into the terminal and accessed over SSH. I like that this brings back some kind of old days of the internet feeling and uses web technologies but sidesteps the public World Wide Web, even though it’s still on the internet. You can try it out too right now, and I’m thinking about making the self-hosting specialized applications part a…
Jul 2026 · duetbrowser.com
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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
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After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com
- 11DA
https://github.com/tombasche/debut As part of work I was tasked with doing a presentation on a part of the Agile Manifesto, so as a way to make it interesting I initially decided to do it as an animated CLI app. Then I remembered curses existed! And a weekend later I ended up with a mini-framework for doing your own presentations in the terminal complete with borders, colours and keyboard interaction. It's also 100% Python with no external dependencies, so feel free to clone it and run it as the readme states.
2020
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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…
13d ago · github.com
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I use this as my regular xterm replacement... Why? Because I can. It's pure-Ruby down to the font-renderer, and the X11-bindings. (I also run a Ruby WM, a Ruby editor, file manager, and more, so this is just par for the course of my descent into madness) It supports double-width and double-height text, unicode (but double-width characters may currently be rescaled down), layering fonts, special rendering of box-drawing characters (to ensure they seamlessly scale and connect, and has reasonably complete vt-100/vt-102 emulation. The whole thing is available as a Rubygem and comes with an…
Jun 2026 · github.com
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Hey everyone! I am excited to share updates on four of my & my teams' open-source projects that take large-scale search systems to the next level: USearch, UForm, UCall, and StringZilla. These projects are designed to work seamlessly together, end-to-end—covering everything from indexing and AI to storage and networking. And yeah, they're optimized for x86 AVX2/512 and Arm NEON/SVE hardware. USearch [1]: Think of it as Meta FAISS on steroids. It's now quicker, supports clustering of any granularity, and offers multi-index lookups. Plus, it's got more native bindings than probably…
2023 · usearch-images.com
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I'm always looking for easy ways to visualize data from CLI so I built something I couldn't find an existing solution for. a := gree.NewNode("root") a.NewChild("child1") a.NewChild("child2").NewChild("grandchild1") fmt.Println(a.Draw()) Makes root ├── child1 └── child2 └── grandchild1 Curious if others find it useful
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN, My name is Ravi Sojitra and i'm working on a Dev Tool product named DhiWise, that let you generate production ready source code(For Node.js,Laravel,Flutter,Kotlin,Swift) in few mins with ready to get synced in your GitHub/GitLab or Download. Let me explain like you're five. Imagine you want to bake a cake and you have all the raw materials you need such as flour, baking powder, eggs. Now, you give us those materials and we will bake you the ready-to-serve cake of your choice. With this product's context, with just minimal technology specific inputs, this builder is going to…
2021
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I'd like to share a project I've been working on for the past few months. It's a distributed workflow engine written entirely in Go. Some highlights: * Tasks are executed in a Docker container * Can run stand-alone or distributed * Highly extensible * Able to enforce limits (CPU/RAM) per task * Web UI Would love the get your feedback on it, and find out if this could be useful.
2023 · github.com
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Built a native Scratch 3.0 runtime in Lua that runs .sb3 projects without a browser. Why? Browser sandboxing prevents access to hardware features (haptics, sensors, fine-grained perf controls). Native runtime gives you direct hardware access and lets you deploy to consoles, handhelds, embedded devices. Also means much smaller binaries (LÖVE is ~7MB vs 50-100MB for Electron). How it works: - Scratch blocks compile to IR, then optimize, then generate Lua - LuaJIT executes the compiled code - Coroutine-based threading for concurrent scripts - Lazy loading + LRU cache for memory management - SVG…
Oct 2025 · github.com
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I built DiagramIDE because I wanted a more modular way to handle diagramming-as-code. It’s a Rust-based GUI (EGUI) where you can split logic, data, and rendering into separate windows. Instead of one giant DSL file, you can script components in Tcl, define relationships in Prolog, and pipe the results into Pikchr for the final render. Fair warning: it’s an early alpha and still quite rough around the edges. I’ve been dogfooding it for my own work so it’s definitely functional but expect unexpected. Shortest way to try it out is a compiled binary release:…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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2022 · github.com
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Hey HN! I've been working on Python bindings for the C-API provided by the terminal image-visualizer chafa. Chafa allows you to view very reasonable approximations of images in your favourite terminal emulator by converting them to characters or, if your terminal is capable, kitty/sixels/iterm2 image protocols. Chafa.py aims to be intuitive and produce very readable code. I hope you like it <3
2023 · github.com
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Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026
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