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 -
⚡️ Familiar tools — content is piped to the pagerless
You might also like:
-
🤹 Native 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
Installing
Via Homebrew
circumflex
is available as a Tap.
# Install
brew install bensadeh/circumflex/circumflex
# Run
clx
From source
You can also build circumflex
from source:
# Run
go run main.go
Keymaps
Press ?/i to show a list of available keymaps:
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
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:
- Text formatting in bold, italics and
code
where available - Labels for Original Posters (
OP
), Parent Posters (PP
) and moderators (mod
) - Adjustable margins and comment width
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
- 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.
Mark submissions as read
Visited submissions are marked as read.
A list of submissions (by ID
) 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:
clx clear
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:
clx add [id]
Favorites are stored in ~/.config/circumflex/favorites.json
. circumflex
pretty-prints favorites.json
to make it both human-readable and VCS-friendly.
Tweaks
Low contrast headers
Overview
Some terminals brighten text in bold in order to give them stronger contrast in dark color schemes. circumflex
uses bold text to give headers and authors names additional contrast for better legibility.
See example screenshots below (low contrast header) of terminal output which does not brighten bold fonts.
Below are a few examples on how to enable bold text in bright colors in different terminals.
Alacritty
- Set
draw_bold_text_with_bright_colors
totrue
- Define
bright_foreground
and set it to a brighter value thanforeground
- (See alacritty/alacritty/pull/1026 for more info)
Terminal (macOS)
- Check
Use bright colors for bold text
under Profiles
iTerm (macOS)
- Check
Brighten bold text
under Profiles → Colors
Classic Hacker News header
You can enable the classic Hacker News header with the -n
flag.
Settings
Run clx help
for a list of available commands and settings.
A table of available flags is provided below:
Flag | Description |
---|---|
-c |
Set the comment width |
-l |
Disable syntax highlighting for the headlines |
-o |
Disable syntax highlighting in the comment section. |
-s |
Disable conversion of smileys (:) ) to emojis ( |
-d |
Disable marking submissions as read |
-r |
Show each line with a number relative to the currently selected element (similar to Vim's hybrid line number mode) |
-j |
Show X is hiring posts from YC-funded startups (does not affect the monthly Who is Hiring? posts) |
-t |
Hide the indentation symbol from the comment section (does not affect quotes) |
-n |
Set the header to orange |
Under the hood
circumflex
uses:
- tcell and cview for the TUI
- cobra and viper for the CLI
- cheeaun's unofficial Hacker News API for providing submissions and comments
less
for viewing comments and articles- go-term-text for text formatting
- go-readability and html-to-markdown for providing articles in Reader Mode
Screenshots use:
- iTerm2 for the terminal
- Palenight Theme for the color scheme
- JetBrains Mono for the font