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 pager less

You might also like:

• 🤹 Adaptive 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
• Comment section
• Reader mode

• Syntax highlighting
• History
• Favorites

• Headers
• Settings
• Tweaks

• Keymaps
• Under the hood

Installing

Via Homebrew

circumflex is available on Homebrew.

# Install
brew install circumflex

# Run
clx

From source

You can also build circumflex from source:

# Run
go run main.go

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:

• Rainbow-colored indentation blocks
• Text formatting in bold, italics and code where available
• Labels for Original Posters (OP), Parent Posters (PP) and moderators (mod)

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
• h/l to hide and show replies
• 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.

History

Mark submissions as read

Visited submissions are marked as read.

Highlight new comments

Comments that are new since the last visit are highlighted.

Disabling history

A list of submissions (by ID and last time visited) 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.

Settings

Run clx help or man clx for a list of available commands and settings.

A table of available flags is provided below:

Keymaps

Press ?/i to show a list of available keymaps:

Under the hood

circumflex uses:

• Bubble Tea for the TUI
• cobra for the CLI
• Algolia's Search API for list of submissions and cheeaun's unofficial Hacker News API for providing comments
• less for viewing comments and articles
• go-term-text for text formatting
• go-readability, html-to-markdown and Glamour for formatting and rendering articles in Reader Mode

Screenshots use:

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