GitHub - bensadeh/circumflex: 🌿 It's Hacker News in your terminal

4 min read Original article ↗

circumflex

circumflex is a command line tool for browsing Hacker News in your terminal

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Main features

  • 🛋 Everything in one place — read both the comment section and articles in Reader Mode
  • 🌈 Syntax highlighting — syntax-aware formatting for comments and headlines
  • ⚡️ Read it with less — use the pager you already know for quick and simple navigation

You might also like:

  • 🤹 Native terminal colors — you bring your own color scheme, circumflex does the rest
  • 💎 Nerd Fonts — full support for Nerd Fonts as icons
  • ❤️ Add to favorites — save interesting submissions for later

Table of Contents

Installing

The binary name for circumflex is clx.

Package managers

# Homebrew
brew install circumflex

# Nix
nix-shell -p circumflex

# AUR
yay -S circumflex

From source

Important

When building from source, make sure that you are using the latest version of less.

Comment section

Overview

Press Enter to read the comment section.

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Comments are pretty-printed and piped to the pager less. To present a nice and readable comment section, circumflex features:

  • Rainbow-colored indentation blocks
  • Text formatting in bold, italics and code where available
  • Labels for Original Posters (OP), Parent Posters (PP) and moderators (mod)

Navigation

The following pair of shortcuts are recommended for browsing and navigating the comment section.

  • d/u to scroll half a screen
  • j/k to scroll one line at a time
  • h/l to hide and show replies
  • n/N to jump to the next top-level comment

Reader mode

Press Space to read the submission link in Reader Mode.

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Note

Some websites do not work well with Reader Mode. If the submission URL points to a domain with known Reader Mode incompatibility, the link cannot be opened in Reader Mode.

Syntax highlighting

Quotes

Quotes are indented, italicized and dimmed in order to distinguish them from the rest of the comment.

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Hacker News and forum idiosyncrasies

`Code snippets`, @username mentions, $variables and URLs are highlighted.

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References

References on Hacker News are formatted as numbers inside brackets. circumflex highlights these numbers for easier cross-referencing.

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Categories

Headlines containing the text Ask HN, Tell HN, Show HN and Launch HN are highlighted.

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YC-funded startups

Twice a year, Y Combinator funds start-ups through its accelerator program. circumflex highlights these startups to signalize their affiliation with YC.

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Nerd Fonts

If you have a Nerd Fonts-patched fonts, you can run clx with the -n or --nerdfonts flag.

History

Mark submissions as read

Visited submissions are marked as read.

Highlight new comments

Comments that are new since the last visit are highlighted.

Disabling history

A list of submissions (by ID and last time visited) are stored in ~/.cache/circumflex/history.json. Disable marking submissions as read by running clx with the -d or --disable-history flag.

You can delete your browsing history from the command line:

Favorites

Press f to add the currently highlighted submission to your list of favorites. Remove submissions from the Favorites page with x.

You can add any submission by its ID from the command line:

Favorites are stored in ~/.config/circumflex/favorites.json. circumflex pretty-prints favorites.json to make it both human-readable and VCS-friendly.

Settings

Overview

Run clx help or man clx for a list of available commands and settings.

Commands

add [ID]      Add item to list of favorites by ID
comments [ID] Go directly to the comment section by ID
article [ID]  Read the linked article associated with an item based on the ID
url [URL]     Open a URL directly in Reader Mode
clear         Clear the history of visited IDs

Flags

-a, --auto-expand           Automatically expand all replies upon entering
                              the comment section
    --categories=[string]   Set the categories in the header
                              (available: "top,best,ask,show,new")
                              (default:   "top,best,ask,show")
-c, --comment-width=[int]   Set the comment width 
                              (default 70)
-e, --disable-emojis        Disable conversion of smileys to emojis
-d, --disable-history       Disable marking stories as read
-t, --hide-indent           Hide the indentation bar to the left of the reply
-n, --nerdfonts             Enable Nerd Fonts
    --no-less-verify        Disable checking less version on startup
-o, --plain-comments        Disable syntax highlighting for comments
-p, --plain-headlines       Disable syntax highlighting for headlines
-v, --version               Print current version

Keymaps

Press ?/i to show a list of available keymaps:

Key Description
Enter Read comments
Space Read article in Reader Mode
r Refresh
Tab Change category
o Open link to article in browser
c Open comment section in browser
f Add to favorites
x Remove from favorites
q Quit

Under the hood

circumflex uses:

Screenshots use: