circumflex is a command line tool for browsing Hacker News in your terminal.

Install circumflex with Homebrew:

# Install
brew install bensadeh/circumflex/circumflex

# Run
clx

Press i to show available keymaps and settings.

circumflex is Hacker News on the command line. It lets you browse submissions by category and read comments. circumflex is customizable, supports Vim-keybindings and respects your terminal's native color scheme.

Comments are pretty-printed and piped to the pager less. To present a nice and readable comment section, circumflex features:

• Text in bold, italics, hyperlinks and code where available
• Labels for Original Posters (OP), Parent Posters (PP) and moderators (mod)
• Ability to jump between top-level comments by searching for ::

On Hacker News, quotes are in their own paragraph and open with a >. They are not further stylized or formatted.

In circumflex, the > symbol is omitted and quotes are instead italicised and dimmed.

Headlines containing the text Ask HN, Tell HN, Show HN and Launch HN are highlighted. On by default, but can be disabled.

Twice a year, Y Combinator funds start-ups through its accelerator program. circumflex highlights these startups to signalize their affiliation with YC. On by default, but can be disabled.

By convention, references on Hacker News are formatted as numbers inside brackets. circumflex highlights these numbers for easier cross-referencing.

Save submissions you'd like to revisit by adding them to Favorites. Press f to add the currently highlighted submission to your Favorites list. Press F to add a submission by ID. Submissions can be removed with x.

Favorites are stored in favorites.json in ~/.config/circumflex.

The available options and their current values are displayed in the Settings View. Overridden values are marked with *. To enter Settings View, press i on the Main View and then Tab to change the category. Note that the settings cannot be changed from within the Settings View.

To change the settings, you can either:

1. edit config.env in ~/.config/circumflex, or
2. set environment variables in your shell

circumflex can create a config.env template in ~/.config/circumflex by pressing t in the Settings View. Edit this file and uncomment the values you want to change.

Depending on your preference, it might be more convenient for you to configure circumflex by setting environment variables. Below are a couple of examples on how to set the variables in different shells. Run the commands directly from your shell to set the value for the current session. Put the commands in somewhere in your dotfiles to make the settings permanent.

Bash and zsh:

export CLX_COMMENT_WIDTH=65

Fish:

set -x CLX_COMMENT_WIDTH "65"

The following table shows the ways circumflex can be configured:

circumflex uses:

• tcell and cview for the TUI
• viper for reading and setting configurations
• cheeaun's unofficial Hacker News API for providing submissions and comments
• less for viewing comments
• go-term-text for text formatting

Screenshots use:

• iTerm2 for the terminal
• Palenight Theme for the color scheme
• JetBrains Mono for the font