Haxor News: Hacker News in the terminal | Hacker News Reader

Haxor News: Hacker News in the terminal

github.com

256 pointsnothrowaways41 comments

Shameless plug my Hacker News TUI app [1] here. I recently released a new version `v0.9.0` [2].

[1]: https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI

[2]: https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI/releases/tag/v0.9....

I guess one of the benefits of HN using such simplistic styling is that its easy to make a TUI that basically resembles the site 100%. This looks awesome!

Yours is made in Rust, the one in this article in Python.

Arch Linux AUR package too - awesome!

This is excellent!

And also - I think that building HN utilities / clients is like the modern nerd FizzBuzz (in a good way). Is it strictly necessary? No, but it’s a great intellectual exercise, it’s something many of us have thought about, and because there’s a common API underlying, it gives folks a chance to learn about lots of creative ways to attack the same fundamental problem space.

Keep it up everyone!

Ironically one of the few websites I actually enjoy using in its web format is hacker news.

Still, this looks really cool! Great job!

same here, I guess simplicity rules for some.

I read medium once a while and wish there is a full text version of that eye-candy site.

This is awesome! Actually, building a HN CLI client is my goto "Todo list app" exercise when I learn new languages.

Here are my versions for elixir: https://github.com/nichochar/CLHN and golang https://github.com/nichochar/clhn-go

(they are much more lightweight than the presented one, but work well)

Last spring I built a dashboard out of a Pocket C.H.I.P [1] and use haxor-news as one of the panes to refresh the top 10 HN posts every minute.

It keeps me from mindlessly flipping to a HN tab to check for new posts, just glance over occasionally to see if anything looks interesting.

1. https://www.ecliptik.com/Pocket-CHIP-Terminal-Dashboard/

I just remembered I have mine still, that seems like as good a use as any. The project is basically defunct now, right?

That’s a pretty neat idea, I may do something similar - if I can find which drawer I stuffed it in that is.

I used to question alternative CLI ui/ux.

Not anymore:

> Coworker who sees me looking at something in a browser: "Glad you're not busy; I need you to do this, this, this..."

> Coworker who sees me staring intently at a command prompt: Backs away, slowly...

Well played.

With 5 monitors one always has code and another terminals/slack. The third always twitch or baseball. No one can tell.

I'll leave games open and an idea full screen on the Central monitor. What am I doing? Even I don't know

Boss keys[1] should be standard for every website. The March Madness[2] one for example. There are some good ones developed for Reddit to look like Outlook[3], shell [4], etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key

[2] https://www.ncaa.com/march-madness-live/boss

[3] http://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit//

[4] https://redditshell.com/

My "boss key" was Alt+Tab. No need to reinvent the wheel

Always be running emerge --sync and emerge --update --verbose in some window

Noted

I've been a remote worker for so long this comment actually surprised me. I forgot games like this have to be played in the workplace

That is such a good point. Applies to spouses and toddlers too for the work from home crowd.

Toddlers that know the difference between browsers and command prompts should be enlisted.

I've thought about building an API that integrates Twillo with the HN API. Lots of planes/airlines have free messaging wifi, but not free wifi. But, if you could text a number and get the top n stories, then read the comments and perhaps the text of the stories (?) would be pretty nice way to pass some time. Alas I haven't done it yet...

I think most of them pass DNS queries. You could do HN-over-DNS.

How do they pass DNS queries? Just UDP on 53? If so, you could just proxy instead of relying on the DNS protocol.

I would guess only port 53 to the DNS server that the DHCP server gives you.

Why not just use a command line browser?

  links https://news.ycombinator.com

I haven't used links, but does it get the comment indentation properly?

I tried just now and it seems the answer is "no" on comment indentation. I don't see any indentation at all, everything is a flat list, left justified.

Edit: tried with elinks as well, same (more or less) thing. :-(

Same with lynx which is a bummer. I was half expecting HN’s <table> layout to work everywhere.

Looks like HN actually uses JavaScript to indent, based on a <td indent="n"> attribute where n is the level of indentation. So it’s more a progressive enhancement than something built into the underlying HTML.

(Edit: I think my initial take above was wrong. Please see below.)

> Looks like HN actually uses JavaScript to indent

I’m not an anti-JS person, but why? CSS seems so much more sensible for that.

I want to correct my initial take above. The JavaScript code I was looking at actually appears to show/hide children in threads.

The indentation appears to be handled separately by invisible GIFs:

  <td class="ind" indent="0">
    <img src="s.gif" height="1" width="0">
  </td>

  <td class="ind" indent="1">
    <img src="s.gif" height="1" width="40">
  </td>

  <td class="ind" indent="2">
    <img src="s.gif" height="1" width="80">
  </td>

Or with browsh. (Btw, kind of scary the Links website is still served over http://)

I feel like this might be a silly question, but does anyone have a good cli RSS reader?

Newsboat and snownews exist, but I don't use them frequently enough to give them a review.

If you like vi-style motion and ranger[0], check feedranger[1]

0. https://ranger.github.io

1. https://github.com/stefandtw/feedranger

One past thread:

Browse Hacker News Like a Haxor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11518596 - April 2016 (61 comments)

Super cool, as long as you can change the font on your terminal! Programming fonts are really aweful for reading prose...

How does this compare to just loading hackernews up in lynx or links2?

Edit: Nevermind, I see. Its actually a very cool interface!

And of course it has to be a Python script and have no proper installer from OS package managers. :(

Amazing. Thank you for posting it!

Nicely done, something I can cross off my todo list!

This is neat!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com