jbranchaud/hn-cli

a command-line interface for accessing HackerNews items

HackerNews Command-Line Inteface - hn-cli

Because real hackers access HackerNews from their terminal.

hn-cli is a command-line interface for HackerNews. It essentially allows you to view the front page of HackerNews from your favorite terminal and then open up the links in your favorite browser.

Installation

For now, simply put hn in a directory that is on your system's path. For instance, you can just throw it in /usr/local/bin which is probably on your path. If you're not sure, type echo $PATH.

Usage

hn - grabs and displays the 30 items from the HackerNews homepage.

hn [open|view] [num] - finds the cached link corresponding to the given num and opens it.

hn update - updates your cached HackerNews items and then displays them (same as hn).

hn list [num] - grabs the first num items (or all items) from the cached list and displays them.

hn help - displays the usage info, but if you are reading this, then I guess you don't really need it.

Requirements

The following is a list of non-standard python libraries needed to run this script:

• BeautifulSoup

FIXMEs

• Some unicode characters appear funky in the output, find out what to do about this.
• Need more graceful failure for various errors (e.g. when server cannot be reached).

TODOs

• Consider incorporating Baker to make it easier to implement the command-line interface
• Create an animated GIF to embed in this readme that demonstrates how hn works
• Add a comments option (either hn view 1 comments hn view -c 1 or hn comments 1
• In preparation for some fancier features, switch from .hn file to .hn directory
• Allow for multiple articles to be opened at once (e.g. hn open 2 5 14)
• Add a history command that allows you to see the last n items that you accessed
• Fancy up the formatting a little
• Try playing with color for the different elements of the HN item. Try using Curses for this.
• Favorite words and favorite URLs list that will highlight HN items based on your preferences
• Add a summ or summary command that gives some idea of what the article is about.
• Add a ran, -r, or random command that will open a random article

Related

• hnews - Hacker News CLI by bencevans
• hackernews (hn) by jeyb
• hackernews by Zalew

License

Copyright © 2013 Josh Branchaud under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

hn-cli's Issues

urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

I was getting this error after dropping your tool into my ~/bin.