Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Starcel – A 3D Desktop Environment, CLI, and More
Hi Everyone! I built this 3D desktop environment, CLI, and visualizer tool. It's in very early stages and has many updates in the pipeline. It is written in UE BP, C++, Python, and some React, Javascript, HTML, and CSS. The included videos describe plans for new features and major updates. I would appreciate any feedback on it!
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Starcel – A 3D Desktop Environment, CLI, and More launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
For the past three years I've been building what I hope will be the next Blender, tackling the lack of any good 2D design or image editing tools outside the Adobe monopoly. This was our first year participating in Google Summer of Code and this Q3 update includes the big payoff from that, covering the most progress we've made so far as a project. If you're a Rust dev, consider getting involved as we apply for the next GSoC in the new year— you could be our intern next summer :) Q3 progress report: https://graphite.rs/blog/graphite-progress-report-q3-2024/
2024 · graphite.rs · its alternatives →
- 2
3D scene editor in your command line
2025 · 3dcli.netlify.app · its alternatives →
- 3MP
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →
- 4OC
2012 · assembly.ynh.io · its alternatives →
- 5
display.dev▲183Last week's post from Thariq "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML" went viral in X. He made a good point about HTML being the more expressive and human friendly alternative to markdown files. I completely buy in where he's coming from, I've been asking Claude Code to create me HTML files to better understand what we're planning and building together. What Thariq didn't address was the part of sharing and collaborating on these HTML artifacts (he proposed uploading to S3). While I've been heavy user of HTML artifacts to share quarterly plans, implementation specs, technical guides and…
May 2026 · display.dev · its alternatives →
- 6
Viberia▲146Hey HN, This is my take on the agent harness. Everything on an isometric map. Agents are grouped into "buildings" that run in a sequence or a loop; e.g., the CodeForge has an agent that writes a PRD, another one that implements, and a third that reviews. Everything is customizable, you build your own buildings/teams however you want. It's a Tauri app, really light (about 8x less energy than the closest competitor I benchmarked, so it actually runs from a coffee shop on battery). It's macOS only for now, but ping me if you are willing to test the Windows or Linux version. I've been…
May 2026 · getviberia.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Cosmic CLI▲117Hi HN, I'm Tony, founder of Cosmic (a headless CMS). We just open-sourced a CLI that covers the full lifecycle of a content-driven app from creating the content model to deploying to production to updating the codebase all without leaving the terminal. Here's what the full workflow looks like: # Create a project with an AI-generated content model cosmic projects create # → "A recipe blog with recipes, categories, and authors" # Generate content cosmic content -p "Create 5 recipes with images across different categories" # Build a full-stack app wired to your content cosmic build -p "A modern…
Feb 2026 · cosmicjs.com · its alternatives →
- 8LightLayer▲94
Hey HN. We're Mus and Isaac - creators of LightLayer. We've been outputting a ton more code since using agentic dev tools. It's been great. But we're starting to see a new bottleneck emerge that's no longer writing the actual code: reviewing code. We’d love to hear from folks here if they’re feeling the inertia of code reviews a lot more these days with the surge in development velocity. For us, it was the reason we decided to pivot what we were working on before, and go full-time on building a workspace aimed at bringing the code review experience up to speed for the AI era. To be clear:…
2025 · lightlayer.dev · its alternatives →
- 9
I've been building computer-use tools for a while, and I quietly launched this about a month ago (122 Stars on GH). I figured it was worth sharing here. Over the last few months, a lot of computer-use agents have come out: Codex, Claude Code, CUA, and others. Most of them seem to work roughly like this: 1. Take a screenshot 2. Have the model predict pixel coordinates 3. Click x,y 4. Take another screenshot 5. Repeat That works, but it's slow, expensive in tokens, and fragile. If the UI shifts a few pixels, things break. And the model still doesn't know what any element actually is. But the…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
So, after years of abandoning Rust after the hello world stage, I finally decided to do something substantial. It started with simple line rendering, but I liked how it was progressing so I figured I could make a reasonably complete PSX style renderer and a game with it. My only dependency is SDL2; I treat it as my "platform", so it handles windowing, input and audio. This means my Cargo.toml is as simple as: [dependencies.sdl2] version = "0.35" default-features = false features = ["mixer"] this pulls around 6-7 other dependencies. I am doing actual true color 3D rendering (with Z buffer,…
2025 · totenarctanz.itch.io · its alternatives →
- 11
Hey HN! We're Charles and Dean. A few weeks ago we posted about Stage, a code review tool that guides you through reading a PR step by step - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796818. We got a lot of great feedback but also heard from many people that they wanted to have the chapters experience even before opening a PR… so we built the Stage CLI as the local, open-source version that anyone can try. Here’s a quick demo video: https://www.tella.tv/video/stage-cli-demo-f55q It works with any coding agent of your choice. The skill instructs the agent to…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
I am a UX designer who has been asked to help design a CLI. Looking for tools to quickly prototype a CLI that could also be easily shared with colleagues or used for user testing, I couldn't find anything. The only option I could think of was to code something from scratch using one of the existing CLI libraries. To make designing, prototyping and user testing CLIs easier for me in the future, and hopefully to help other designers who are not as comfortable with coding, I have developed this CLI prototyping tool. I would be very interested to hear if this tool would be useful to other people…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Hi HN, I’m one of the devs behind StarDesk, a P2P-first remote desktop we’ve been building for ~1 year. We started this partly out of frustration: some popular RDP tools haven’t seen meaningful updates in a long time, and long-standing issues are often left unaddressed. As devs, we really dislike software that stagnates once it “works well enough”. StarDesk is our attempt to do it differently. What we focus on: -P2P by default (relay as fallback) -Low RTT + low jitter > chasing max bitrate -Encoder / input path tuned for real-time interaction -Modern E2EE (TLS/DTLS) UX-wise, setup…
Jan 2026 · stardesk.net · its alternatives →
- 14
:sparkles: Browse trending GitHub projects from your command line - GitHub - hedyhli/starcli: :sparkles: Browse trending GitHub projects from your command line
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Onboard-CLI—a blazing-fast developer tool I built in Go. It uses AST parsing (Tree-sitter) to map out codebase architecture and automatically blocks spaghetti code and bad dependencies locally before you even commit. I heavily optimized the concurrency, so it can parse 50k+ files in under 10 seconds.
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hey HN, About a year ago I shared a first MVP of a visual node-based system for CI/CD pipelines that I've been very passionate about. I've been building on it since, and it's now live. I've always liked building pipelines and workflows, but I've never liked writing YAML for anything more than simple linear tasks. Branching, conditions, loops, or trying to just run certain things in parallel always gets messy. So I built Actionforge, a visual node system to tackle some of these pain points. Instead of writing YAML yourself, you build workflows as graphs. While Actionforge still uses YAML…
Feb 2026 · actionforge.dev · its alternatives →
- 17WP
This was my recent weekend project, aimed at teaching me JavaScript, a bit of HTML5, and (mostly) WebGL. The orbital data are from NASA JPL. I was inspired in part by this Flash app: http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/orrery_2011_bce.swf, but wanted to do something in 3D. Coming from the games-dev world, this is my first introduction to web coding. The UI is jquery. I mostly used http://learningwebgl.com/blog for the 3D stuff. Being WebGL, it will work mostly on Chrome, Firefox 4 Beta. Forget about IE. I needed to figure out how to render text to the WebGL canvas - I…
2011 · solar-system-explorer.com · its alternatives →
- 18
- 19RT
rx is a lightweight CLI and runtime that lets you deploy any function instantly as you save it in your editor. It’s fast, simple, and takes care of setting up all your cloud infrastructure. The best dev experience with everything you need built-in: - auth - permissions - payments - secrets - storage - logs - email & SMS - and way more Related beta launch tweet: https://x.com/KhalidZoabi/status/1777673531972608249 Wanted to show it to you guys, gauge interest, and get some feedback. There's a large roadmap of upcoming stuff. Feel free to DM me on X for more information!
2024 · rx.run · its alternatives →
- 20
Hey HN, As most of you (I think?), I cannot learn something without having a project, on the side, to implement what I’ve just learned. Recode is the project that I've used to learn Go. It lets you create a development environment in your cloud provider account easily. You can think of it as a desktop version of Gitpod / Coder / GitHub Codespaces less polished and with less features but 100% free and open-source. At the time of writing, it only works with Visual Studio Code and AWS. In order to let you configure your development environments easily, I’ve chosen to use Docker with…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21VD
Hey HN – We made [Von.dev](https://von.dev), an AI-native development environment to build full-stack apps. Our differentiations: Multiple Tech Stacks (Python and React), AI model selection, VS Code in browser, Use your own Openrouter key, Deep Data Integration such as google sheets and many more We are currently in beta. Looking for feedback from devs building serious tools or internal apps who want more power than current AI coding assistants offer. Try it here: [https://von.dev](https://von.dev) Happy to answer any questions! - Harsh
2025 · von.dev · its alternatives →
- 22
process demo - https://i.redd.it/fbhlwsq1gcmg1.gif render demo - https://i.redd.it/smddwtryhcmg1.gif I love making creative software. I spent a few years making pixel art software but recently have gotten into 3d animation and 2d animation and really wanted a way to realize crazy ideas. Blockbench didn't feel quite right, spline is super well made but felt catered too much to just idle website animations, and I really didn't want to fall down a master class in Blender just to make some silly stuff. While I'm definitely not discounting Blender's literal…
Mar 2026 · app.topomaker.com · its alternatives →
- 23
I'm the developer. Happy to share the process and learnings. Architecture: - Custom SoA ECS for cache-friendly iteration, zero allocations in hot loops. Benchmarked against bitECS/miniplex. - Process manager inspired by Game Code Complete's but data-oriented so processes are pure data, systems contain the logic. - Multi-field gravity with 5 types (point, parallel, segment, cylinder, convex hull) with spring-damped transitions between fields. - Rapier3D WASM with SIMD. Gravity-aware fake shadow system for playability. - WebGL 2 shared context between Three.js and Pixi.js. - Debug editor…
Apr 2026 · supertommy.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hey HN! We’re the team from Normal / Normcore.io. We built gamekit-cli, an open-source command-line tool for developing Unity games with Claude Code. We love working with Claude Code. It's great for creating quick prototypes, writing complex systems code, and test suites. However, we work a lot with Unity and found we couldn’t move anywhere near as fast with Unity projects as we could when working on backend code. Claude Code works best when it has the ability to compile the code it writes and test its own work. There wasn’t an easy way to do that with Unity, so we made gamekit-cli!…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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