Hacker News

A terminal reader for Hacker News. Browse the top, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN, and jobs feeds, open articles inline, and navigate with a Vim-inspired keyboard layout — all themeable with the built-in Charming themes. The source lives at pandorocks/hackernews and it installs as the hackernews gem.

A Charming TUI app rendering a Hacker News reader in the terminal

Run It

From RubyGems:

gem install hackernews
hackernews

Or from a source checkout:

git clone https://github.com/pandorocks/hackernews
cd hackernews
bundle install
bundle exec hackernews

Inline article reading extracts full article text with trafilatura, which must be installed and on your PATH.

Keys

Key	Does
`j` / `k`, arrows	move cursor
page up / page down	jump 10 items
`n` / right	next page of stories
left	previous page
`enter`	open selected article
`esc`	close article, back to feed
`r`	refresh current feed

What It Demonstrates

Async background loading — feeds load in parallel threads without blocking the interface.
Talking to a real API — the controller fetches from the Firebase-hosted Hacker News API with HTTParty and caches articles in state.
State without a database — HomeState holds stories by page, the feed index, the article cache, and loading indicators, all in memory.
Reusable components — widgets like StoryListComponent handle their own rendering.