Alternatives
Products that do what Small Collection of Emacs Packages does
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,…
- 1LI
Hi HN! I kept hearing about Lisp and why it was special but didn't have a great place to start. I wanted something self-contained that helped me develop intuition rather than fluency. My hope is this is helpful for casual programmers, professionals from other fields who interact with code, or engineers who haven't had much exposure to interpreters or compilers. Hope this helps anyone else who's curious about getting a sense of Lisp and what makes it special with a limited time investment! Feedback or other cool Lisp things welcome :)
2022 · github.com
- 2KO
2018 · github.com
- 3LP
Hi! I am doing a learning project, attempting to build an imperative language (and interpreter). The end product will be useless for others, I just want to learn and better understand how to build imperative languages. :) If someone else shares this interest and want to give some good hints on good resources I would be grateful. Currently I am looking at an awesome text by Bob Nystrom. All suggestions and tips on resources are most welcome. I am very much a beginner in this, but I find this topic very fascinating. Mail me or post links here! Cheers! You can try a beta version Online at…
2020
- 4
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
- 5FW
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
- 6EC
Hey all, As a CEO of a growing startup I don't get to code as often as I like and when I do, I try not to annoy my team with my terrible code :) So to scratch the itch, I've built some of side projects related to what our company does. The latest is embedcurl.com I see a lot of API docs and blogs posting curl commands that are really hard to read and I figured I could make them easier to read and add some niceties like easier copy/paste, tooltips on flags, etc. They also gracefully degrade if javascript isn't enabled back to a element. The parsing is done in Python with shlex and…
2013
- 7DM
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
- 8IF
The point of this seemingly useless exercise was to stress-test my elisp-eval MCP https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions/tree/main/tools/... AI hands it a string of Lisp, it runs inside live Emacs session, poking into it via emacsclient. Behaves like a REPL the LLM can drive - state persists between the calls. Emacs is a Lisp machine. Buffers, files, network, subprocesses, games, major modes, the UI itself: every feature is already an elisp function. Hand an LLM a way to run arbitrary elisp and it inherits the entire Emacs API for free. No…
Apr 2026 · imgur.com
- 9SC
Not too long ago, a project of mine was shared here on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126052 In that thread I wrote: > I have this vision in my mind: embedding lone modules into sections of the lone ELF and shipping it out. Zero dependencies, self-contained. I've been working on that since that day. Proud to say I've gotten it to work and thought I'd make it the subject of my first Show HN. Some free software projects gained features along the way too. The link is to an article with a proper demonstration, technical details and what happened in the past few weeks.…
2023 · matheusmoreira.com
- 10UA
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
- 11IB
Hi HN, A lot of the dev teams I have worked with had a lot of issues with their documentation. In fact, some of my easiest clients to get were from clients that had "black box" solutions that devs no longer at the company had created. Personally, writing documentation is like grinding nails on a chalkboard. I have been having a lot of fun with building solutions that can run in a distributed way, not something a dev needs to run themselves. And after a significant amount of testing and building out several different solutions, I finally have a solution that is easy to set up and runs in the…
Dec 2025 · codesummary.io
- 12AE
2025 · github.com
- 13LM
This is my side project for the past few months. I started it because I just learned about functional programming and at the same time want to write something cool in C. Web playground: https://leonw774.github.io/lreng
2025 · github.com
- 14HM
Hi, I'm Marcus. I've spent the last 15 months or so home-coding on a document database, after work, on weekends (every waking hour). My plans for this particular weekend was to implement log-structured writing. It went faster than I thought and the results were faster querying times and fast, append-only writes. I've been working on this for almost a decade and being this close to the finish line feels surreal. This is my seventh iteration I believe. Everytime I realized I had an architecture built on a bad model I walked away, often in fury, depressed over my weak coding abilities but…
2017
- 15WD
Hi there! I made this tool called Finish UP to help me do exactly that with my personal projects and work tasks. I found that I had a few problems that cross-cut the majority of my projects: 1. I have loads of new ideas for projects, or tasks to do like learning German, but I do not always know where to start 2. I open a kanban board and then do not know what type of tasks to start with, how detailed they should be, or to what extent they can overlap 3. I started using ChatGPT and equivalents to help me ideate and put in place initial plans, but as soon as I asked questions about certain…
2025 · finishup.ai
- 16DC
I built this tool a couple days ago to temporarily hide your prints & comments. I wanted to focus on the core logic without having to constantly delete/add prints and comments. Lmk if you like it ;)
2024 · marketplace.visualstudio.com
- 17IB
Hi HN, I've been working on this for a while and it was hard to decide when to stop, either on the way information is presented or when to stop with adding entries. It's not meant as a blog, but rather as a reference that keeps growing. Link: https://thehardparts.dev Currently I've created 4 main section: - Failure Modes: ways project go wrong - Red Flags: early signals that are worth taking seriously - Tech Decisions: common and not so common trade-offs for hard choices - Playbooks - guided approach for situations that repeat I've also focused on creating links between them to…
Apr 2026 · thehardparts.dev
- 18QG
This is a tool which lets you easily manage different versions of ideas, helpful for writing essays. I've found myself wanting this every single time I go through the drafting process when writing, and I've been frustrated every time I find myself accidentally working on an old draft just because there was a paragraph that I liked better. This solves it. I hope the community like this as much I enjoyed working on it! Note that it's currently a beta waitlist because there's some bugs with the undo/redo state management and so I want to dogfood it for a bit for reliability. It says April…
Mar 2026 · quillium.bryanhu.com
- 19AA
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
- 20IL
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
- 21IB
The main goal of this was to be able to not just run multiple Claude Code sessions at once, but actually manage them and keep track of what I was doing. Sometimes this is multiple attempts on the same task, sometimes I work several tasks at once. Really I was just sick of twiddling my thumbs waiting for the coding agent to finish, and I wanted it to be easy to work on/review/test another change while I waited.
2025 · github.com
- 22AI
I have been a devoted vim user for almost 3 decades and frankly it has served me well! Yes I do get tempted to try out the next best thing (though Zed has some serious names so am even more tempted). But frankly something about staying in the terminal that I am just too used to and dont want to change. Though I never bothered updating the vimrc often (did 4 "major" updates in those years) I found myself wanting to update my vimrc for vimspector. This time instead of again trying to understand vimscript and reading the various docs, I let claude code on it and dang it has been a fun journey…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 23SM
In past few weeks, I wrote several chapters to learn Scheme, a programming language of the Lisp dialect. The writing is not final as many chapters are missing. I wrote this because I wanted to improve my Scheme knowledge and increase the (low) number of Scheme literature. The writing is inspired by Calculus Made Easy, which I learned about here on HN. This is why I'm sharing it here. But keep in mind that my writing style is not as good as that in the above-mentioned inspiration. Feedback is very much appreciated.
2024 · schememadeeasy.com
- 24CO
First tutorial to date. Writing your first C program, includes a link at the bottom with a detailed look at printf() as optional reading. I would love some feedback, as I intend writing up a lot of dev articles for people to learn from : www.xanthu.com/first-c-program
2013
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →