hackernews-TUI

hackernews_tui is a Terminal UI to browse Hacker News with fully customizable and vim-like key bindings.

hackernews_tui is written in Rust with the help of Cursive TUI library. It uses HN Algolia search APIs to get Hacker News data.

The application mainly consists of the following views:

Why hackernews-TUI?

If you are either

This application is the right tool for you :muscle:

Table of Contents

Install

Using cargo

Install the latest version from crates.io

Run cargo install hackernews_tui to install the application as a binary.

Build from the master branch

Run

```shell

git clone https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI.git

cd hackernews-TUI

cargo build --release

```

to build the application, then run

```shell

./target/release/hackernews_tui

```

to run the application

Arch Linux

Run yay -S hackernews_tui to install the application as an AUR package.

NetBSD

Using the package manager

```shell

pkgin install hackernews-tui

```

Building from source

```shell $ cd /usr/pkgsrc/www/hackernews-tui

make install

```

Examples

Demo

List of demo videos:

Story View

Example of a Story View - Front Page

Article View

Example of a Story View - Front Page

Search View

Example of a Search View

Comment View

Example of a Comment View

Default Shortcuts

In each View, press ? to see a list of supported keyboard shortcuts and their functionalities:

Example of a Help View

Global key shortcuts

Key shortcuts for each View

Story View shortcuts

Article View shortcuts

Link dialog shortcuts

Comment View shortcuts

Search View shortcuts

In SearchView, there are two modes: Navigation and Search. The default mode is Search.

Search mode is similar to Vim's Insert mode, in which users can input the query string.

Navigation mode allows the SearchView to behave like a StoryView with all StoryView shortcuts enabled.

Key shortcuts:

Navigation mode also supports a subset of StoryView's key shortcuts.

Configuration

By default, the application will look for ~/.config/hn-tui.toml as its configuration file.

You can specify the path by specifying the -c or --config argument when running the application:

shell hackernews_tui -c ~/.config/hn-tui.toml

For further information about the config options, please refer to the example config file by running hackernews_tui --example-config.

Note: all config options (as included in the example config file) are required. You can run

shell hackernews_tui --example-config > ~/.config/hn-tui.toml

then modify the config options in ~/.config/hn-tui.toml based on your preferences.

Article Parse Command

To enable viewing a web page in reader mode with Article View, you must configure the article_parse_command field in your configuration file:

```yaml

"articleparsecommand" defines a command to parse a web article's content

to a markdown format. The parsed data is then used to render ArticleView

of the corresponding article.

#

The command must have the following form:

[articleparsecommand] [article_url] [options...]

It should return a JSON string representing the parsed Article data:

pub struct Article {

title: String,

url: String,

content: String,

author: Option, // optional

date_published: Option, // optional

word_count: usize, // optional

}

articleparsecommand = {command = "mercury-parser", options = ["--format", "markdown"]}

articleparsecommand = {command = "article_md", options = []}

```

If you don't want to implement an article parser by your own, one way to configure article_parse_command is to use mercury-parser, a web parser tool that hackernews_tui has been using by default since the version 0.6.0. mercury-parser is powerful and stable. However, in some cases, the text content it returns when parsing HTML code tags has some weird indentations.

An alternative is to use article_md, a CLI tool I wrote for parsing web article's content into a markdown format. Under the hood, it uses mozilla's readability, so the parsed text for HTML code tags look nicer.

User-defined shortcuts

Shortcuts in each View are fully customizable, for further information about the supported keys and the corresponding functionalities, please refer to the user-defined key bindings sections in the example config file by running hackernews_tui --example-config.

Custom Keymap

It's possible to define a custom shortcut to switch between different kinds of StoryView (front_page, show_hn, ask_hn, etc) with stories filtered by HN Algolia's numericFilters. An example of defining such a custom shortcut can be found under the Custom Keymap section of the example configuration file.

Debug

Run

shell RUST_LOG=debug hackernews_tui 2> log.txt

to view the application's log in log.txt file.

Roadmap