Alternatives
Products that do what Screenwriting Software does
I’ve spent the last year getting back into film and testing a bunch of screenwriting software. After a while I realized I wanted something different, so I started building it myself. The core text engine is written in Rust/wasm-bindgen.
- 1IA
2014 · github.com
- 2
- 3WF
2020 · philipkiely.com
- 4WG
2020 · paytonturnage.gitbook.io
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12AA
2018 · amp.rs
- 13IW
2021 · github.com
- 14
- 15RA
2015 · github.com
- 16PM
This software is primarily aimed at micro budget and student producers who do much of their collaboration over the Internet rather than face to face in an office on a studio lot. I think the key selling feature is the ability to export a script from Final Draft and then automatically create the scene breakdowns and production board. The dominant player in the space is Movie Magic with their Scheduling and Budgeting software which run about $500 each. $1,000 is the whole budget for a lot of student films. For simpler productions this captures the basic features that they would need in…
2012
- 17GM
Written in Rust! (not really) I've been using Git for writing recently and was lacking a good UI for editing markdown files when away from the laptop. I created GitWriter to fill that gap. It's built with Expo and I added caching for offline editing with local sqlite, writing goals and a bunch of other features. Markdown is having a huge moment thanks to AI and more and more people are starting to see Git is a really solid choice for creative and technical writers. I've recently launched for iOS and would appreciate feedback!
Feb 2026 · gitwriter.io
- 18FW
I’m specifically looking for a tool a user shared on here that facilitated writing for content by scrolling up and disappearing text as new text was inputted. I believe it was a HTML/JSS only solution - a small personal project. I’ve done a lot of focused searches, but haven’t been able to find this comment. That said, I love these sorts of projects. I know they’re a self-indulgence and often a distraction. I’m celebrating that for a moment, personally. Please share your favorites writing tools, the smaller and more personal the better.
2021
- 19CA
A recent HackerNews comment - “For one programmer's hourly cost, you could run 4000 CPU cores continuously. Can there really be no practical way to apply thousands of cores to boosting the programmer's productivity?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19339467 This is what we have come up with. The current productivity tools - Slack, Asana, Trello, Facebook Workplace, etc. - are great, but lack direct access to your code. Building a tool directly around the code makes it more powerful for software developers: CoDiff. https://codiff.com The foundation of CoDiff is a…
2019
- 20RA
2015 · github.com
- 21CR
2022 · github.com
- 22IB
I built a Rust binary (~700KB, two dependencies) that snaps onto any Windows application, continuously reads its UI Automation accessibility tree into a SQLite database, and lets external processes control the app via SQL INSERT. The core insight: every GUI application already describes itself as structured text through the accessibility layer (built for screen readers since 1997). Every major AI lab is taking screenshots of this and running vision models on it. DirectShell just reads the text directly. What it does: - Reads every button, field, menu item into a queryable SQLite DB…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 23HX
2020 · github.com
- 24RA
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.…
2025 · github.com
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →