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Ask HN: What open source software do you wish existed, but does not?

3 points by acaloiar ↗ HN
I'm curious if there's any consensus around the problems that could be solved with software, but aren't getting any attention from the open source community.

In a world of public software forges chock-full of open source software, it's hard to imagine that there are problems that could be solved with software that aren't getting any attention. But I suspect there are many.

I use "software" broadly here. Answers may refer to libraries and frameworks for developers, but perhaps more importantly, applications for both highly technical and average users.

My hope is that this question both reveals solutions that already exist for which others thought none existed, and real gaps where the open source community can step in and start creating solutions.

5 comments

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chunk_waffle
I'm probably the minority with this request but: A Sublime Text clone, with many of the same features and at least some level of compatibility with existing packages. That'd be great.

And it's not that I don't want to pay for Sublime, I just want it to work on OpenBSD.

acaloiar
Even as a non-Sublime user, that's a pretty interesting idea.
Daeraxa
As somebody who is working on an active editor project... the more editors the better! Yeah, actually surprised by the fact there isn't, I was asked recently if we were able to or planned to support Sublime syntax v1 & v2 in addition to the textmate & tree-sitter grammars we already support and wasn't really able to find anything that supported them at all.
zzo38computer
There are many things that I had wanted to find which are not commonly available in FOSS, or are difficult to find, or are just not available at all:

- Simple music playback library like MOD/S3M/IT/XM formats but you will provide your own command stream and instruments (including possibility of non-12-TET music) instead of loading from any file format.

- Non-Unicode SQLite. (Non-Unicode can greatly improve speed of some functions, as well as making some operations considerably less messy.)

- Fonts of TRON character set (especially bitmap (screen) fonts and PostScript fonts). (There does not seem to be a good way to do it with TrueType, although with bitmap fonts it could easily be done, and anyways I like to have bitmap fonts.)

- Program you can other non-Xaw GUIs with Xaw. (Or, a better GUI, like Xaw is; none of the other ones used these days have its features and otherwise like it; in my opinion they are just made mostly worse)

- A Pokemon battle simulator library in C.

- FOSS implementation of BTRON. (There is one called B-Free which unfortunately seems to be incomplete and abandoned. I had forked and only made a single change so far, which is adding the D (64-bit) type. If date/time type is then D instead of W, then the year 2053 problem can be avoided.)

- Zoned spreadsheet.

(I had done a few things related to some of the above, but not much.)

axiologist
* A linux command line utility to either remove pen markings of scanned book pages and/or separate the visual text from any non-text into a separate image.

* A linux command line utility horizontally aligning text lines of scanned book pages. The existing python utilities for dewarping/deskewing are not there yet.

* A linux command line utility to replace text portions of scanned book pages with a matching vector font.