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Arcan Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to arcan
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AppSignal
Monitoring that respects your time & budget. APM, error tracking, and dashboards for modern web apps. Ten-minute setup, transparent flat pricing, and support from engineers who actually use the product.
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Windows Terminal
The new Windows Terminal and the original Windows console host, all in the same place!
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llvm-project
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
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kitty
If you live in the terminal, kitty is made for you! Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based.
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Kargo
Stop Scripting Promotions. Start Shipping with Kargo. Kargo automates promotion across dev, staging, and prod with approval gates and verification. Open source, built by the team behind Argo CD. Download now.
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jc
CLI tool and python library that converts the output of popular command-line tools, file-types, and common strings to JSON, YAML, or Dictionaries. This allows piping of output to tools like jq and simplifying automation scripts.
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wprs
wprs implements rootless remote desktop access for remote Wayland (and X11, via XWayland) applications.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives.
Hence, a higher number means a better arcan alternative or higher similarity.
arcan discussion
arcan reviews and mentions
Posts with mentions or reviews of arcan.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2026-08-24.
- Visualizing Binary Files
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Stop Making TUIs
https://arcan-fe.com/ proves you can have all of that and more without having an archaic TUI.
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Ask HN: The Next Big OS Leap
Nope, because we already could have had that with VR/AR glasses, and while there are some (even impressive) options now, they aren't mainstream. Neither are the 'apps', nor the content interoperable, exchangable.
Furthermore I see nothing wrong with the desktop metaphor, it's just that we mostly only had a miserable magnifying glass, giving only a small viewport into a crammed childs toy, instead of real large high-resolution screens as can be had now, or sensible virtual desktops for more common sizes. To be expanded by "Metisse", an early 2.5D extension for FVWM, and later "User Interface Faćades". Maybe with some Zoomable UI sprinkled on top, like in https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/ or whatever the clandestine weirdos from https://arcan-fe.com/ may come up with. (IF. EVER.)
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Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
Wayland made writing WMs needlessly hard, and the benefits of Wayland were frankly not real - most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later. All the Wayland rewrite got us was a situation where Wayland is both bleeding-edge and obsolete simultaneously. Say what you like about X11, but by the time people unironically pushed for mass Wayland adoption, X11 was stable and boringly so.
The future of WMs is, IMO, Arcan - https://arcan-fe.com/ - but that's an ambitious project and I don't blame the main developer for deliberately going out of his way to avoid advertising it before it's ready. In the meanwhile, Wayland and X11 both more-or-less work with the occasional major pain in the ass.
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The Terminal of the Future
- https://arcan-fe.com/ which introduces a new protocol for TUI applications, which leads to better interactions across the different layers (hard to describe! but the website has nice videos and explanations of what is made possible)
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Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
Chisnall has stated several times over on Lobsters that he's thinking of basing is future project on Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/). It's a very interesting project.
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In praise of grobi for auto-configuring X11 monitors
Yes, multi-protocol display servers like Arcan are the future.
https://arcan-fe.com/
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Dear sir, you have built a compiler (2022)
You should take a look at arcan, it's almost exactly that: http://arcan-fe.com
- https://arcan-fe.com/2022/10/15/whipping-up-a-new-shell-lash...
- https://arcan-fe.com/2024/09/16/a-spreadsheet-and-a-debugger...
I am not using it as a daily driver, because, emacs, but I keep an eye on it because, well, emacs.
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Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11
This was very cool, and is made in Arcan! https://arcan-fe.com/ a project I just recently discovered and am very excited about
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State of the Terminal
You might be interested in Arcan desktop engine ( https://arcan-fe.com ), which as a tui api for clients. It has been used to build an interesting shell experiment: https://arcan-fe.com/2022/10/15/whipping-up-a-new-shell-lash...
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A note from our sponsor - AppSignal
www.appsignal.com | 11 Sep 2026
Stats
Basic arcan repo stats
43
1,823
8.2
about 2 months ago
letoram/arcan is an open source project licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0 or later which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of arcan is Zig.
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