Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Starling Desktop
Done with innumerous file versions and endless searching?
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Starling Desktop launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IR
A year ago, my co-founder launched Desktop Docs here on HN. It's a Mac app we built with Electron that uses CLIP embeddings to search photos and videos locally with natural language. We got positive feedback from HN and our first paying customers, but the app was almost 1GB and clunky to use. TLDR; rebuilding in Rust was the right move. So we rewrote the app with Rust and Tauri and here are the results: - App size is 83% smaller: 1GB → 172MB - DMG Installer is 70% smaller: 232MB → 69.5MB - Indexing files is faster: A 38-minute video now indexes in ~3 minutes instead of 10-14 minutes -…
2025 · desktopdocs.com · its alternatives →
- 2SN
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 8IC
Hi, I'm a developer and first time i shipped the real product after observing the startups and indie hackers community for years. I had made so many useless apps [you should check my website https://ansh.life], but this time I built a very useful product that has a number of super easy-to-use tools in one app for video, music, and photo files. Users can compress, convert, resize, and do so much more with easy-to-use tools. Background: I developed a frame-by-frame video cropper to upload cropped landscape videos to Instagram Reels. However, it required FFmpeg, and as a noob video…
2025 · pimosa.app · its alternatives →
- 9
- 10CT
When I came across a study that traced 4.5 million fake GitHub stars, it confirmed a suspicion I’d had for a while: stars are noisy. The issue is they’re visible, they’re persuasive, and they still shape hiring decisions, VC term sheets, and dependency choices—but they say very little about actual quality. I wrote StarGuard to put that number in perspective based on my own methodology inspired with what they did and to fold a broader supply-chain check into one command-line run. It starts with the simplest raw input: every starred_at timestamp GitHub will give. It applies a…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11VF
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
GUI disk analyzers are great for figuring out what's filling up your laptop/desktop drive. On containers or remote servers, the options are limited to purely text based utilities (e.g. du) or list-centric TUIs (e.g. ncdu) which are usually limited to viewing one directory at a time. I created leaves to fill that gap. Inspired by classic utilities like WinDirStat and KDirStat, it uses a 2-dimensional treemap^1 visualization to show the entire directory hierarchy with proportionally sized rectangles. It's performant enough to handle millions of files, thanks to Rust and multi-threading.…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Generate production-ready files directly in your chat
Apr 2026 · blog.google · its alternatives →
- 15SA
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!
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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spacecake▲79Run Claude Code agents in terminal with a visual editor
Feb 2026 · spacecake.ai · its alternatives →
- 19IB
2025 · meetcosmos.com · its alternatives →
- 20
- 21PC
Hi HN. I built Payload to make file transfers easy for less-technical users who need large/fast transfers, so I have focused on auto-discovery, drag-and-drop, visually distinct device icons. It's using Tauri (an "Electron alternative" built on Rust) which keeps my binaries small and bundles to .msi, .dmg, .deb and .appimage. No CLI, iOS or Android support (yet). The network stack is a separate binary written in Go. It uses mDNS for local network discovery and TLS over TCP or Quic, with a public Ed25519 keypair for each device. The protocol is ad-hoc and symmetrical control stream using…
2022 · payload.app · its alternatives →
- 22TA
As the creator of TerarkDB (acquired by ByteDance in 2019), I have developed ToplingDB in recent years. ToplingDB is forked from RocksDB, where we have replaced almost all components with more efficient alternatives(db_bench shows ToplingDB is about ~8x faster than RocksDB): * MemTable: SkipList is replaced by CSPP(Crash Safe Parallel Patricia trie), which is 8x faster. * SST: BlockBasedTable is replaced by ToplingZipTable, implemented by searchable compression algo, it is very small and fast, typically less than 1μs per lookup: * Keys/Indexes are compressed using NestLoudsTrie(a…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
AI-powered desktop fast file and inside file search platform
Oct 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24RT
Hello HN! I am very excited to introduce Ritt, the tag-centric file manager. Tags are excellent for managing images, videos and documents, yet most file managers implement tagging functionalities as an afterthought. Not so with Ritt. Ritt is an acronym for Representation of Independent Tag Trees. As the name suggests, tags are front and center in Ritt. Ritt is designed to allow for fast and efficient batch tagging of files (and folders). Drill down to your desired files by intersecting and/or excluding tags. Other features include: - Sync tags across machines - Advanced search by…
2024 · ritt.app · its alternatives →
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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 →