Show HN: Circumflex, browse HN in your terminal

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

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:

• 🤹 Adaptive terminal colors — you bring your own color scheme, circumflex does the rest
• 🛠 Easy customization — quickly enable or disable features
• ❤️ Add to favorites — save interesting submissions for later

Table of Contents

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Installing

Via Homebrew

# Install
brew install circumflex

# Run
clx

From source

# Build and run
go run main.go

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

Comment section

Overview

Press Enter to read the comment section.

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.

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. See validator.go for a full list of incompatible sites.

Syntax highlighting

Quotes

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

Hacker News and forum idiosyncrasies

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

References

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

Categories

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

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.

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

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

-c n, --comment-width=n

      Set the comment width

-p, --plain-headlines

      Disable syntax highlighting for the headlines

-o, --plain-comments

      Disable syntax highlighting in the comment section.

-e, --disable-emojis

      Disable conversion of smileys (:)) to emojis (😊)

-d, --disable-history

      Disable marking submissions as read

-t, --hide-indent

      Hide the indentation symbol from the comment section (does not affect quotes)

-n, --nerdfonts

      Use Nerd Fonts icons as decorators

--force-dark-mode, --force-light-mode

      Override setting the color scheme automatically

-a, --auto-expand

      Auto expand all replies in the comment section

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:

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/JXL3mVE