[HN Gopher] HN-text: an easy-to-use, text-first Hacker News term...
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       HN-text: an easy-to-use, text-first Hacker News terminal client
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2024-06-02 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | sockbot wrote:
       | Would you consider adding armhf as a build target? This would
       | make it useful for a wide range of older devices including
       | Raspberry Pi 1 or 0, which are more likely to be used via console
       | interface.
        
         | lexoj wrote:
         | Good point, will look into it, thanks!
        
       | Zambyte wrote:
       | > distraction-free Hacker News terminal client.
       | 
       | This seems contradictory :)
        
         | andai wrote:
         | I have been working out plans for making an interesting subset
         | of the internet available offline (along with a search engine).
         | 
         | However, I realized that my entire motivation for working
         | offline was that it eliminates distraction. So it would defeat
         | the purpose!
         | 
         | However I'd still much rather be distracted on Wikipedia (or
         | even HN) than other sites (esp. those with primarily images,
         | gifs or video).
         | 
         | I might need to segment it into "tiers", and have more fun
         | parts come "online" as the day progresses...
        
       | arcastroe wrote:
       | I used to enjoy this alternative CLI
       | 
       | https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news
       | 
       | But the docker image seemed to dissapear from docker hub so I
       | stopped using it.
        
         | lexoj wrote:
         | I've tried this one and I found it a bit unpleasant UX to type
         | numbers to select the story I want to read. (Hence I wrote
         | something like hn-text that I can navigate/open articles using
         | only one hand and visually)
        
       | cristoperb wrote:
       | Is there a way to refresh from the front page? or do you just
       | quit and start it again?
        
         | lexoj wrote:
         | Very good feature request, will definitely implement next :)
         | 
         | (So for now, yes, press q to quit and run it again)
        
           | austinjp wrote:
           | When launching it, the user can just wrap it in 'while true ;
           | do .... ; done' and hey presto, 'q' is the refesh key.
        
             | lexoj wrote:
             | That's pretty clever and works quite nicely (i just tried)!
        
       | shayonj wrote:
       | cool project! nice
        
       | andai wrote:
       | Nice! I spent a few months in a bandwidth constrained environment
       | (bluetooth tunnel to free Cafe wifi across the town square...). I
       | generally got a few KB/s. The recent article on Antarctica's
       | internet reminded me of those days.
       | 
       | HN was one of the only sites that was reasonably pleasant to use
       | during that time. Still, I found it more fun and faster to surf
       | via a VPS. So the VPS itself would load and render the page, and
       | only send me the bytes over Mosh (a more efficient SSH protocol).
       | 
       | I tried a few terminal based browsers using this setup. The one
       | that worked best for HN (especially comment indentation!) was
       | w3m.
       | 
       | Here's the current thread in w3m:
       | https://files.catbox.moe/zuabb4.png
       | 
       | I did have fast mobile data but it was expensive and limited. I
       | watched a lot of videos on YouTube and one day realized that
       | almost everything I watched was actually just lectures or
       | discussions. So I could just stream the audio and save 80% of the
       | bandwidth.
       | 
       | I set up a little PHP script* that took a YouTube URL and ran
       | `youtube-dl -g f bestaudio` to give you the URL of an audio-only
       | stream. (Directly from YouTube's servers!)
       | 
       | I could then just load it directly in my browser, or download it
       | for later. (I think I should have used `worstaudio` instead.)
       | 
       | * That little utility page is not up anymore, but others found it
       | very useful so I should probably make another one...
       | 
       | Another benefit of this is to battery life (decoding video is
       | expensive) and being able to turn off the screen (a feature that
       | Google banned from the app store, years before making their own
       | (paid) version available...) Later I learned about f-droid and
       | newpipe... good times :)
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-02 23:00 UTC)