OSHit -- Get your hit of the Orange Site in the terminal

Introduction

OSHit is a read-only terminal-based client for HackerNews. It provides the ability to view all the top/recent items in the major categories, as well as allowing viewing comments and user details. Where relevant, bindings are always available to open the relevant view on HackerNews itself in your web browser.

Please note that this client isn't designed to allow reading any and all stories on HackerNews, it's about reading what's current "hot" or new, within the categories provided by their API.

Installing

pipx

The package can be installed using pipx:

$ pipx install oshit

Homebrew

The package can be installed using Homebrew. Use the following commands to install:

$ brew tap davep/homebrew
$ brew install oshit

Running

Once installed run the oshit command.

Main features

When run up the opening display is a list of items, the initial list being the current top stories and jobs on HackerNews. Other lists available, via shortcut keys or via tabs at the top of the screen, are "New", "Best", "Ask", "Show" and "Jobs".

Pressing u when viewing a job or a comment will open a dialog that shows the details of the user who posted the item.

When viewing a story or job and pressing c a dialog will open that will let you view and navigate its comments.

Tweaking

Because of the nature of the HackerNews API there might be a need for you to dial in the ideal number of concurrent connections made to load up the data, and also the timeout for the connections. As of the time of writing the defaults are 50 concurrent connections and a timeout of 20 seconds.

If you run into problems press F11 and tweak the maximum concurrency and connection timeout values to taste (or look in ~/.config/oshit/configuration.json and change the "maximum_concurrency" and "connection_timeout" values).

Getting help

If you need help, or have any ideas, please feel free to raise an issue or start a discussion.

TODO

Things I'm considering adding or addressing:

• Chill out on item loading (see #2)
• Add a configuration dialog for the connection value tweaks.
• Some degree of caching of items to reduce API hits.
• Expand the text-cleaning code to handle links, etc.
• Look at some "markup" of comments, eg: make quoted text more obvious.
• Add searching
  • Amongst the current view
  • Amongst loaded comments within comment view
  • All of history (hn.algolia.com)