codebam/rtv

Browse Reddit from your terminal

RTV (Reddit Terminal Viewer)

RTV provides an interface to view and interact with reddit from your terminal.

It's compatible with most terminal emulators on Linux and OS X.

RTV is built in python using the curses library.

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• Demo
• Installation
• Usage
• Settings
• FAQ
• Contributing
• License

Demo

Installation

Python package

RTV is available on PyPI and can be installed with pip:

$ pip install rtv

Native packages

macOS

$ brew install rtv

Arch Linux

$ # Install the latest official release
$ yaourt -S rtv
$ # Or to keep up to date with the master branch
$ yaourt -S rtv-git

Usage

To run the program, type

$ rtv --help

Controls

Move the cursor using either the arrow keys or Vim style movement

• Press up and down to scroll through submissions
• Press right to view the selected submission and left to return
• Press space to expand/collapse comments
• Press u to login
• Press ? to open the help screen

Press / to open the navigation prompt, where you can type things like

• /front
• /r/commandprompt+linuxmasterrace
• /r/programming/controversial-week
• /u/me
• /u/multi-mod/m/art
• /domain/github.com

See CONTROLS for the full list of commands

Settings

Configuration

Configuration files are stored in the {HOME}/.config/rtv/ directory

See rtv.cfg for the full list of configurable options. You can clone this file into your home directory by running

$ rtv --copy-config

Media

You can use mailcap to configure how RTV will open different types of links

A mailcap file allows you to associate different MIME media types, like image/jpeg or video/mp4, with shell commands.

This feature is disabled by default because it takes a a few extra steps to configure. To get started, copy the default mailcap template to your home directory.

$ rtv --copy-mailcap

This template contains examples for common MIME types that work with popular reddit websites like imgur, youtube, and gfycat. Open the mailcap template and follow the instructions listed inside.

Once you've setup your mailcap file, enable it by launching rtv with the rtv --enable-media flag (or set it in your rtv.cfg)

Environment

RTV will respect the following environment variables when accessing external programs

$BROWSER

Submission links will be opened inside of your web browser. On most systems, the default web browser will pop up in a new window. If you prefer the complete terminal experience, try using a console-based web browser (w3m, lynx, and elinks are all good choices).

$PAGER

Extra long comments and submissions can be opened using the system's pager.

$RTV_EDITOR

Composing posts and replying to comments is done using your preferred text editor. If not specified, the default system $EDITOR (or nano) will be used.

$RTV_URLVIEWER

A url viewer is a tool that can be used to extract hyperlinks from inside of blocks of text. urlview and urlscan are known to be compatible with rtv. These applications don't come pre-installed, but are available through most systems' package managers.

Copy

RTV supports copying submission links to the OS clipboard. For macOS it is supported out of the box, in Linux systems RTV will need xsel or xclip commands to be installed in the system.

FAQ

Why am I getting an error during installation/when launching rtv?

If your distro ships with an older version of python 2.7 or python-requests, you may experience SSL errors or other package incompatibilities. The easiest way to fix this is to install rtv using python 3. If you don't already have pip3, see http://stackoverflow.com/a/6587528 for setup instructions. Then do

$ sudo pip uninstall rtv
$ sudo pip3 install -U rtv

Why do I see garbled text like M-b~@M-" or ^@?

Quick fix

Try starting RTV in ascii-only mode with rtv --ascii

Explanation

This type of text usually shows up when python is unable to render unicode properly.

1. Make sure that the terminal/font that you're using supports unicode
2. Try setting the LOCALE to utf-8
3. Your python may have been built against the wrong curses library, see here and here for more information

How do I run the code directly from the repository?

This project is structured to be run as a python module. This means that in order to resolve imports you need to launch using python's -m flag. This method works for all versions of python. See the example below, which assumes that you have cloned the repository into the directory ~/rtv_project.

$ cd ~/rtv_project
$ python3 -m rtv

Contributing

All feedback and suggestions are welcome, just post an issue!

Before writing any code, please read the Contributor Guidelines.

License

This project is distributed under the MIT license.