Show HN: Hacker News without leaving your terminal

25 27 15 years ago

I put this together since I find myself switching away from the terminal to see if anything new popped up in HN. There might be similar ones out there, didn't bother looking. It was a quick experiment, which might end up with a few more features.

makecheck5• 15 years ago

Pretty neat.

Note that in order to work on Mac OS X, the word "wget" should change to "curl" in the script. (Otherwise it works exactly as-is.)

jeybalachandran5• 15 years ago

Great catch, I have wget installed via brew so overlooked that, I'll create a patch shortly.

spatten• 15 years ago

When you say "If you're terminal is awesome, you can ⌘-click on the links to open them in a browser.", what kind of awesome do I need?

I'm running plain old terminal on OS X.

(oh, and not to be picky, but that should be "your", not "you're")

brandur• 15 years ago

iTerm2 for OS X will do this: http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home

Groxx• 15 years ago

They probably mean iTerm2 (which is a definite upgrade, worth it if you haven't tried it)

xdissent2• 15 years ago

Plain old terminal works for me, but you have to ⌘-double-click.

kip_• 15 years ago

I'm running plain old terminal on OS X Lion and if I hold down the ⌘-key and double click, the link in the terminal opens in my default browser.

makecheck5• 15 years ago

MacTerm does this, for one.

http://www.macterm.net/

dangrossman• 15 years ago

I tried it on CentOS (RHEL) 5.6

    [admin@gold admin]# hackernews
    sed: invalid option -- E

    [admin@gold admin]# sed --version
    GNU sed version 4.1.5

lastsurvivor• 15 years ago

same error here.

nzmsv• 15 years ago

Changing "sed -E" to "sed -r" and all instances of "==" to "=" makes this script run on my Debian system. Unfortunately, it leaves the terminal blue when it is done.

makecheck5• 15 years ago

If you add a line like the following to the end of the script, any color changes should be undone:

    echo "\033[0m"

Also, I believe Debian's /bin/sh is "dash" whereas it is "bash" on most other systems. You could change your copy of the script's header to use "/bin/bash" instead of "sh" (assuming that bash is installed too), which is easier than fixing equal-signs and such.

As far as the original code is concerned, using "perl" may be slightly more portable than "sed -E".

jeybalachandran5• 15 years ago

There is a patch in master to support both Debian and Mac OS X. OS X doesn't use GNU sed which was the source of the problem.

tuananh• 15 years ago

kind of cool but in the end, you need to open your browser anyway !!

makecheck5• 15 years ago

Here is one way to force your browser to open a URL by entering a terminal command:

    echo 'open location "http://my.domain.com/some/file.html"' | osascript

fceccon• 15 years ago

You can also open an url with:

   open http://my.domain.com/some/file.html

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

Not to be rude, but what does this get me over elinks?

xdissent2• 15 years ago

You're altering the terminal colors without resetting them. You should output a reset code after you're done (\033[0m IIRC?) or (drastically) issue `reset`. Although, a blue terminal is kind of a nice change.

jeybalachandran5• 15 years ago

Fixed, thanks!

Nic0• 15 years ago

I used pkrumins ncurses hacker-top program, it's nice. https://github.com/pkrumins/hacker-top Sometime it has a bug to retrieve news, and I fixed it. https://github.com/Nic0/hacker-top

Certainly a nice way to follow HN, the only advantage with the website, it to have gray links on already visited links. That's mainly why I don't use it anymore.

klapinat0r• 15 years ago

A "solution" to this could be a small local cache or sqlite db. Say you use Chrome, then you could have a cronjob which checks your history (given you're not in cognito) sqlite db for links in your last `$ hackernews` run. Not saying it's an adequate way to solve it, but it certainly is a hack ;)

makecheck5• 15 years ago

Here's a couple of edits that will pull colors from the 256-color (XTerm) palette and make the titles bold:

  blue_highlight=`echo "\033[0;38;5;68m"`                                                                                                      
  brown_highlight=`echo "\033[0;1;38;5;202m"`
  . . .
  . . . (end of script)
  echo "\033[0m"

jeybalachandran5• 15 years ago

Thanks, fixed in master. Also updated so only uses colors via a -c argument.

lightyrs• 15 years ago

This is dangerously good. Thanks?

JacobIrwin• 15 years ago

Cool.. Here I was thinking the HN web app was as simple and plain as I could view the feeds..

zx2c4• 15 years ago

Dear Sir,

You have committed an egregious atrocity: you parse XML with a regex.

Please read this classic post: http://goo.gl/wPtKX

Thank you, Internet

jeybalachandran5• 15 years ago

I was counting on someone pointing me to that. Well aware of it and appreciate the reality check. I did this as a quick-and-dirty solution, I haven't tried parsing XML in shell, ever. Do you have suggestions?

Show HN: Hacker News without leaving your terminal

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