Decker revives HyperCard's spirit for the browser, with a scripting twist

Decker is a free, open-source multimedia platform for building and sharing interactive documents that combine sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior. It consciously channels HyperCard and the black-and-white look of classic Mac OS — a ‘1-bit ditherpunk’ aesthetic — while modernizing the experience with deep undo, scroll-wheel and touchscreen support, better keyboard navigation, and bulk editing. It runs directly in a web browser, and people use it for e-zines, note-taking, presentations, adventure games, and pixel-art doodling. Decks save as standalone files stored in a line-oriented text format that plays well with Git and other version control.

For heavier projects, Decker ships a scripting language called Lil that borrows imperative ergonomics from Lua and functional ideas from Q (an APL-family language), adding implicit scalar-vector arithmetic and an embedded SQL-like query syntax. The platform is also command-line friendly: a standalone interpreter, Lilt, can read, write, and headlessly execute Decker documents, compiles to a cross-platform APE binary for run-anywhere shell scripts, and there’s even a Lil interpreter that runs on POSIX AWK. Built-in and user-defined interactive widgets can be copied and pasted as plain text, so any deck doubles as a reusable parts toolkit.

The project’s positioning is as notable as its features. Decker includes no advertising, telemetry, gamification, or generative-AI integration, framing itself explicitly against tools that erode user privacy and autonomy. Released under the MIT license with source and a bug tracker on GitHub, it distributes periodic builds for macOS and Windows via Itch.io and hosts twice-yearly ‘game jams,’ with the next scheduled for July 2026. It’s a deliberate throwback that argues creative constraints and local-first simplicity are worth preserving.