HNClient
HNClient copied to clipboard
florian
An awesome desktop client for Hacker News
HNClient – A desktop client for Hacker News
This app lets you comfortably read Hacker News without having to open an endless amount of tabs anymore. You can choose articles to view from a sidebar and can optionally read articles and their comments next to each other on a split screen. The app works on Mac, Linux and Windows.
Features
- You can easily choose articles to view and switch to the comments, no more endless new tabs for HN
- Optional split screen: View articles and their comments next to each other
- Easily navigate the App with Vim like keyboard shortcuts
- Comments are foldable
- Things that are overlooked by most HN apps weren't forgotten, stuff like displaying HN polls, rendering PDFs or not showing a website for Ask HN posts
- Automatically loads new articles if you scrolled down far enough
- It's Open Source, you can change it however you like! :)
Keyboard shortcuts
| action | shortcut |
|---|---|
| next story | j |
| previous story | k |
| cycle between display modes (links, comments, both) | l |
| next comment | n |
| previous comment | m |
| fold / expand the current comment | enter |
| reload stories list | r |
| display a list of all shortcuts | h |
Tech overview
- Electron
- ES6, React and Redux
- Stylus and css-modules
- Webpack
- JavaScript Standard style
- Mostly follows the conventions of the electron-react-boilerplate
- Uses the nice node-hnapi which wraps HN's official API. HN's API itself is sadly not very usable so far, e.g. to fetch all 200 comments of a thread we'd need to do 200 requests, which would greatly degrade user experience. Thanks to node-hnapi this app does not need to do that.
A word on packaging
Currently the Windows and Linux builds don't use an installer program to bundle everything into a single file. I guess that would be the optimal packaging but I don't have any experience programming for Windows / Linux. So I'm hoping someone might contribute if it's important to them :)
Contributing
Please follow the JavaScript Standard style!
Developing
# Run both next to each other. The app will then automatically hot reload changed modules
$ npm run hot-server
$ npm run start-hot
Packaging
$ npm run build
$ npm run package # to package for the current platform
$ npm run package-all # for all platforms
Ideas
While I implemented all of the features I definitely wanted, there's also a list of feature ideas.
florian