Hacker Curse

View Hacker News and Reddit.com pages from within your terminal. This gem contains several programs/ utilities:

  • a library to parse HN and reddit subforums
  • a program/wrapper that uses the above to generate a tab seperated output (TSV) that may be further used as a filter
  • a program/wrapper that uses the library to generate a YML file that can be used by client programs
  • an interactive utility named redford that displays stories/articles on the screen (using ncurses)
  • an interactive utility named corvus that displays stories/articles on the screen (using ruby but not ncurses). corvus was used as a prototype for redford but may still be used if you are not interested in using a curses version.

The ncurses version is also based on hackman which is a ncurses frontend to view RSS feeds from HN, reddit, ars, slashdot.

Installation

$ gem install hacker-curse

Usage

The basic library uses nokogiri to parse hacker news and reddit.com subforums into a similar structure so that a single program can render output from both sources.

  hn = RedditNewsParser.new :subforum => 'ruby'
  or 
  hn = HackerNewsParser.new :subforum => 'news'

  page = hn.get_next_page
  page.each_article do |a|
      print a.title, a.age_text, a.points, a.comment_count, a.article_url, "\n"
  end
  art = page.first
  art.each_comment do |c|
     print c.age_text, c.points, c.submitter, "\n"
     print c.comment_text
  end

This program comes with several wrappers which display how to use the library and the wrappers may themselves be used as-is.

For example, hacker-tsv.rb prints the articles and its details such as age, points and number of comments, url, comments url, submitter etc in a tab delimited format. This may further be used be filtered or sorted by other programs.

As an example, the following retrieves two pages of stories from Hacker News and save the retrieved HTML file, the output goes to the terminal/screen.

 hacker-tsv.rb -H hn -p 2 -s news -w news.html

Retrieve one page of articles from reddit.com/r/ruby printing the tab delimited rows to the screen.

 hacker-tsv.rb -H rn -s ruby

hacker.rb is a wrapper over hacker-tsv.rb that saves the output of the above into tab delimited files. It can guess the host based on the argument.

 hacker.rb news
 hacker.rb newest
 hacker.rb programming
 hacker.rb --pages 2 ruby

corvus is an interactive program (non-ncurses) that uses the generated YML files, and displays a selectable list of stories which a user may navigate, select and launch the article (or comments) in a gui or text browser. User may switch between forums, reload the file, view the articles in a long list or short list, single or multiple columns etc. corvus requires at least ruby 1.9.3 in order to get single characters.

NOTE: The TSV file should be used as a command-line filter, and not in applications or front-ends. Use the YML file for frontends.

The YML wrapper has been called as:

 hacker-yml.rb --pages 1 -H rn -s ruby -y ~/tmp/hacker-curse/ruby.yml

The host is "rn" or "hn" (for reddit or hacker news), the subforum is ruby (can be programming or python or java, etc), and the YML file location is also given.

redford.rb can use configuration from a file named ~/.redford.yml. A sample file named redford.yml is in the root folder of this gem.

Contributing

  1. Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/hacker-curse/fork )
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create a new Pull Request