We are thrilled to officially welcome six amazing new software projects to the Handmade Network! It's been a long time since we've added anything new to the Projects page, but despite our negligence, the community has been hard at work building some truly amazing software.
So let's get into it!
Blick is a new video editor made by Dihedron, a new startup led by Wassim Alhajomar. Community members already know Wassim as the creator of two other official HMN projects, AV-Racer and Cactus Image Viewer, and for Blick he has assembled a team of Handmade programmers to tackle industry juggernauts like Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.
As is typical of aggressively Handmade software, despite its breadth of features, the executable clocks in at just 20MB, and Wassim tells me half of that is ffmpeg. I've long believed that it's our job as Handmade programmers to make existence proofs of what software can be, and Blick is some strong proof.
Satelital is perhaps the platonic ideal of a Handmade game: a single developer, a custom engine, custom development tools, and absolutely gorgeous art, made without a single line of generative AI.
The creator, Miguel Dorta, has been sharing updates on the project for years, and we are so excited for him as he finally releases this game to the world. Make sure to check out the project's feed so you can see how it has evolved over time, and go give the game's free demo a try on Steam.
fred is a lovely little editor (a FRiendly EDitor, in fact) that we recently featured at the Handmade Network Expo in Vancouver. It is, of course, tiny and fast, but its most distinguishing features are a unique "history graph" that goes beyond mere undo/redo, and a plugin system built on C.
fred doesn't give up on developer ergonomics just because the plugins use C, though. fred bundles TCC so that plugins can be compiled and reloaded without any external tools. If you are in the market for a new code editor, give it a try!
(By the way, fred's creator Cameron DaCamara also participated in our Handmade Essentials Jam earlier this year with a diff viewer called Gap. Give that a look too!)
Our Paint is probably the most robust art tool ever created by a member of this community. It's designed as an anti-Photoshop painting tool, with a rich and realistic pigment system and explicitly without any features for globally editing or altering your work. The author explicitly wanted a program that helps artists hone their art skills.
Our Paint also gives artists very rich control through a node-based brush editor. It's always amazing to see what the community creates when artistic talent meets programming talent.
Wintrace is a new time-travel debugger for Windows. If you're not familiar, a time-travel debugger can step backwards through your code, suddenly making many convoluted or rare bugs easy to debug and consistently reproduce.
The Achilles heel of any time-travel debugger is its overhead, since program execution need to be recorded at a very high level of fidelity. Wintrace boasts a very impressive overhead of just 4x, which while not trivial is very practical for most programs. In fact, the creator, donadigo, has shared a video of The Talos Principle running under Wintrace at a totally playable frame rate.
The debugging experience itself is provided by a fork of the excellent RAD Debugger. Tech like this deserves to be easy and pleasant to use, so I'm thrilled to welcome Wintrace to the Network.
And finally, Icarus is an ambitious C/C++ IDE by Giovanni Carlino, a young member of the community. Already Icarus has core IDE features like syntax highlighting and code folding, an integrated debugger, and lots of customization options. The project is still early but Giovanni has been working incredibly hard at it and we are excited to see where the project goes!
As a meta note, we just rolled out our new AI policy earlier this month, and all six of these projects are shining examples of what programmers can accomplish through good old-fashioned hard work and talent. Of the six projects above, a majority have no AI code at all, and for the couple that are using AI, the authors are using AI very carefully to accelerate their work without compromising on quality. We hope the results speak for themselves!
Congratulations to all the authors, and we look forward to seeing where all of these projects go in the future.
-Ben