Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Small Collection of Emacs Packages
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,…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Small Collection of Emacs Packages launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
- 2
This is a project I've wanted to write for a long time now. I really love the ideas from Nix and I still have a ton of respect for the project, but Nix-the-language never felt intuitive to me and I wanted something with more approachable tooling (although this was circa 2016, so I'm sure Nix has improved a lot since then too-- that was before Flakes were around!) Anyway, I started on the current iteration of Brioche about 6 months ago, and I finally cut an initial release. I'd still consider this a "technical preview" version (performance especially is pretty painful, so that'll be a focus…
2024 · brioche.dev · its alternatives →
- 3
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 · its alternatives →
- 4
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
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…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6DM
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 · its alternatives →
- 7LP
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 · its alternatives →
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 9FW
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 · its alternatives →
- 10SC
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 · its alternatives →
- 11
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 · its alternatives →
- 12
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 · its alternatives →
- 13
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 · its alternatives →
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 15
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 · its alternatives →
- 16
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 · its alternatives →
- 17
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 · its alternatives →
- 18
Sticky Notes▲10I've been wanting a simple sticky notes board as my browser's new tab page for ages. So last week I built one in half a day using Claude Code. It's written in Vue 3, client-only. The code quality honestly surprised me. I wrote an extensive prompt: what it should do, what it should look like, how I wanted the project set up, reusable components, composables, what I wanted and didn't want. Put Claude to work, went for a walk, came back to more or less what you see on the site. It wrote some code I would've done differently, but it also did useful things I hadn't thought of. No backend, no…
2024 · notionwithali.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
- 19
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 · its alternatives →
- 20
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 · its alternatives →
- 21
An extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor and more
2016 · gnu.org · its alternatives →
- 22
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 · its alternatives →
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 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 · its alternatives →
Also compare
- I wrote a technical history book on Lisp alternatives
- Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager alternatives
- Lisp in Five Days alternatives
- Kind of reinventing Emacs and Elisp – looking for feedback alternatives
- My Emacs Zero to IDE Journey alternatives
- Dap-mux – Connect your editor and REPL to the same debug session alternatives
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 →