Before cohost collapses, I wanted to say that I think Decker is one of the coolest things ever. Are there any other projects that you'd like to highlight, from either yourself or others, that follow a similar design ethos/vibes? Or alternatively, any lesser-known tools and/or toys you think are neat?
That's very kind of you to say. Sorry for the slow reply; I wasn't quite sure how to answer.
Before I started work on Decker I spent nearly a decade refining and using Octo, a browser-based IDE for the CHIP-8 virtual machine. CHIP-8 has become something of a rite of passage for anyone interested in emulator development, but I thought the minimalism of the platform made writing new software for it an interesting and aesthetically appealing challenge. One of the last things I did with Octo was a ground-up rewrite as a standalone C application, providing the same kind of holistic development experience as Decker.
In terms of being another self-contained all-in-one tool for making things, PuzzleScript deserves a mention; it offers a very neat declarative rule-based language for defining Sokoban-like puzzle games and, like Decker, it can produce standalone HTML exports. For more narrative-oriented experiences, there's Bitsy by our own @ldx. The default appearance for Dialogizer text boxes are a little nod to Bitsy. :)
Another project that I think contains some of the same essence as Decker, if not aesthetic, is tiddlyWiki, which shares Decker's very unusual ability to not only produce single-file HTML "exports" but also retain all the editing features in those copies, and so on in perpetuity. I wish that more software retained its plasticity and user-modifiable nature through its whole life-cycle like this. My earliest exploration of computing orbited around spending countless hours using ResEdit to hack up and customize software on the Macintosh SE I rescued out of a dumpster, and it's a tragedy that modern operating systems and tools offer users so much less agency.
