A Python script for browsing Hacker News and Lobsters discussions with a nostalgic interface emulating classical usenet and mail readers, like slrn and mutt.
It was primarily written so I could highlight interesting threads and keep track of read / unread messages (see blog post). The UI showing one message at a time also encourages slower, more focused reading.
On Unix-like systems it only depends on Python 3.9. On Windows you may also need to install windows-curses.
It doesn't require installation. You can run it simply with:
$ curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/luke8086/retronews/main/retronews.py
$ python3 ./retronews.pyPress ? to see available keybindings.
To customize retronews without directly editing the script, you can put any valid
Python code in ~/.retronewsrc.py (or other location specified with --rcfile) to
be executed on startup. For example:
# Ignore type warnings
from typing import Any
retronews: Any
# Example: Custom key bindings
retronews.KEY_BINDINGS[ord('a')] = lambda app: retronews.cmd_prev(app)
retronews.KEY_BINDINGS[ord('z')] = lambda app: retronews.cmd_next(app)
# Example: Custom colors
retronews.COLORS['author'] = (retronews.curses.COLOR_RED, -1)- The reader is read-only, there are no plans to support voting and posting
- Message formatting is not perfect, but works well enough most of the time
- Detecting if threads contain unread responses works by only checking their count, it's not reliable if any responses were deleted
NNTP doesn't support browsing threads by title (let alone paginated) and requesting their messages on demand. Clients need to fetch metadata of all available messages in all available threads in advance. Given the volume of messages on HN, synchronizing them to the gateway is not practical. Even when attempted, some clients struggle with the sheer number of messages in a single group.
- HN Search @ Algolia - The underlying API used to retrieve messages
- nntpit - An NNTP gateway to reddit.com
- circumflex - Another, more advanced TUI for HN