haxor-news
A command-line interface for browsing Hacker News with advanced filtering and terminal-based viewing.
What is haxor-news?
haxor-news is a command-line interface (CLI) tool that allows users to browse Hacker News directly from their terminal. It provides features like viewing posts, filtering comments, searching job listings, and displaying web content in a terminal-friendly format. The tool solves the problem of inefficient web browsing by offering a fast, keyboard-driven alternative with advanced filtering capabilities.
Developers, sysadmins, and command-line enthusiasts who regularly read Hacker News and prefer terminal-based workflows for speed and automation.
Developers choose haxor-news because it integrates Hacker News into their existing terminal environment, supports powerful filtering to manage information overload, and follows Unix principles for composability with other CLI tools.
Overview
Browse Hacker News like a haxor: A Hacker News command line interface (CLI).
Use Cases
Best For
- Quickly scanning Hacker News posts without leaving the terminal
- Filtering lengthy comment threads to find relevant discussions
- Searching monthly job posts for specific technologies or remote roles
- Automating Hacker News content extraction with scripts and cron jobs
- Viewing web content in a terminal when a browser isn't available
- Integrating Hacker News data into command-line pipelines
Not Ideal For
- Users who need to view embedded images or videos from Hacker News links, as terminal display is text-only
- Teams requiring collaborative features like shared commenting or real-time notifications
- Mobile-only users without access to a terminal environment
- Projects needing advanced search beyond regex, such as semantic or natural language queries
Pros & Cons
Pros
Supports filtering comments by unseen status, recency (past 60 minutes), or custom regex queries, making it easy to manage large discussions, as shown with examples like '-cu' for unseen comments.
Seamlessly integrates with pipes and redirects for automation, allowing output to files or other CLI tools, highlighted in commands like 'hn hiring "regex" > jobs.txt'.
Includes an optional fish-style auto-completer with inline help, simplifying command discovery and usage, demonstrated in the README gifs and examples.
Users can customize ANSI colors via a ~/.haxornewsconfig file, enabling personalized highlighting, as detailed in the Customizable Highlighting section.
Cons
On Windows, pager functionality is restricted, requiring users to use '| more' instead of full-featured pagers, as noted in the Windows Support section.
Requires Python and pip installation, which can be a barrier for non-Python users, and virtualenv setup is recommended, adding complexity.
Web content is formatted for terminal display, which may not handle complex HTML or multimedia effectively, and viewing in a browser requires an extra flag (-b).
Frequently Asked Questions
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