Show HN: Browse Anime from the Terminal | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Browse Anime from the Terminal

github.com

73 pointsBenex25434 comments

Can someone explain the appeal of cramming what is effectively a GUI into a terminal? This sort of thing has always been popular around here, but I never saw the appeal. The main benefits appear to be usage over SSH, and a certain obscure style due to running in a terminal.

I think it's a desire for minimalism. In a world filled with websites saturated with ads, clickbait and constant attention grabs, this is like walking from an overcrowded city street into a Zen garden.

It's an app for browsing lists of anime. How is this not a constant stream of attention grabs?

Well, if someone opens this app their goal probably is browsing lists of anime, so the attention grabs you're hinting at are intentional, and thus not 'attention grabs' in the sense the parent commenter is talking about.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense, my mistake for posting before coffee.

Attention grab here surely means something grabbing your attention away from what you're trying to look at.

For me personally, it also has something to do with TUIs feeling more 'snappy' and reliable than many GUIs. For example, when I'm scrolling in Slack to get to previous messages, I'm often looking at blank space while messages load. Or when I open a search engine in Safari, often I cannot type in the search box without clicking on it first. Or in a JetBrains IDE I try to type code but the file navigator still has focus and now I'm using the 'file search' modus which I did not intend to use. I almost never have these issues with TUIs. They're mostly fast and behave like I expect. Can't think of how to explain this better right now.

In theory I like GUIs better as you can do a lot more with them, but they disappoint me so often that I often prefer a TUI (or a commandline tool).

I think this isn't due to the TUI itself (and this one isn't text, it has images in!) but downstream of a whole load of other choices. You rarely have this with game UIs, for example.

It's not just the use of immediate mode, but a whole stack of design decisions to prioritize snappiness.

Consider how quickly conhost.exe starts compared to the new cmd.exe

Most of it is because of ancillary stuff and heavy dependencies.

Modern GUI frameworks are a bit of a dumpster fire. They're unresponsive mess with poor contrast, frequently based around elements designed for a 7" touch screen[1], despite primarily being used with mouse and keyboard input and a full sized monitor.

[1] Like hamburger menus. These make zero sense in a desktop GUI. They make perfect sense on a small vertical screen, but horizontal screen space is just not a scarce commodity on a 27" screen. All these things accomplish is making a button that's harder to accurately click.

For me, it's much more about my workflow. I spend a lot of time in the terminal anyway, and running things there means a lighter context switch. Moving between apps (=panes), zooming, copy-pasting, all works the same.

Apart from the benefits you already mentioned, mainly that TUI applications are usually keyboard driven.

It's probably because TUIs are inferior and limited in their abilities compared to GUI or WebUI, so the creators are putting more work into polishing them in what they can deliver, ending in an overall better user experience in their specific area.

The main benefits are that programs are lightweight, snappy, and cross-platform.

I don't like using them so much as I've gotten older, but they are simpler to build, more fun to build, the design options aren't as open-ended, and the tooling is pretty good and crossplatform.

The idiosyncrasy of a GUI in your terminal is also part of its charm, especially in how it looks.

I think it's similar to the appeal of making a webapp in a fun tech like Elm except it has access to the filesystem and can do whatever it wants, so it's also less limiting.

Same reason I use vim: staying in the terminal with just my keyboard feels efficient, even if it’s just for fun.

I'll very likely never use this because web and android apps are just too comfortably but I've thoroughly enjoyed seeing the level of detail, quality and options available there.

One question (and apologies if it was on the documentation), but is it possible to automate to download and archive series for later watching without internet? This is my number #1 usage scenario, mostly getting the fresh chapters and have them locally because they disappear from the URL after some time or I might want to just watch while travelling without internet somewhere.

Thank you.

yeah

Just skimming the README, is there actually something inherently special about anime? Or is there some quasi-standard format how you acquire them these days (maybe something with subtitles?) - I think the last anime I played on a computer was still DivX ;)

I see mpv, so it's basically a file browser for movie files?

It has some hardcoded ability to download episodes from streaming websites and bittorrent. See references to `AnimeProvider` and the impls under `/fastanime/libs/anime_provider/`. (This might also create problems for hosting this on GH in the first place. Let's see...)

Benexl, the person who also wrote the beautiful and featureful yt-x for browsing youtube. You can rely on this guy to make a gorgeous terminal UI.

Thanks for mentioning yt-x, I'll give it a try. I'm so tired of YouTube absolutely crushing my CPU usage in Firefox.

Please consider changing the Gif in the README to a video. Not only it's a half the size (I just checked), it will also allow people to pause, rewind etc.

will do

I think that viewing from the terminal can be convenient when actively using it with zellij, tmux, etc.— when in one pane you're developing, in the second the build is running, and in the third you're watching anime.

I'll finally have something productive to do while waiting for the project to compile!

Related tool: ani-cli

https://github.com/pystardust/ani-cli

Has termux builds as well

FastAnime is ani-cli but on steroids

Wow, this is an incredibly robust CLI. One of the more feature complete (and aesthetically pleasing) terminal UIs I’ve seen. Well done!

thanks

This is a really cool tool. Will definitely be my go to for downloading anime and then plopping them on my Jellyfin server. May also just replace using Twitch in a browser for background noise, which usually kills resources on my dev machine.

Because there are a certain number of people who want to do all work on the terminal, this is a wonderful app for such people.

I found it very stylish that you displayed "DEATH NOTE" in the background!

Perfect for Arch users ;)

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