Show HN: Hntui – A TUI for Hacker News

A sleek and elegant tui for browsing one of the best tech news sources.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ahmd-sh/hntui/main/install.sh | sh

hntui

- Browse all six HN feeds: Top, New, Best, Ask, Show, and Jobs.

- Navigate through a post's comments.

- Save posts for later.

- Vim + mouse support.

- Themes.

- ... and a really cool Knight Rider scanner animation for loaders (◕ᴗ◕ )

Any modern terminal with truecolor, mouse support, and UTF-8 will work. I've tested it in Ghostty on MacOS. Linux/Windows is supported by OpenTUI but I haven't tried it (yet).

The prebuilt binaries have no dependencies. Installing through npm (or hacking on the code) needs Bun 1.2 or newer.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ahmd-sh/hntui/main/install.sh | shInstalls a self-contained binary to ~/.local/bin. You can also grab a binary for your platform directly from the releases page. Binaries cover macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux (x64, arm64) — on an Intel Mac, use the Bun install below.

bun add -g @ahmd-sh/hntuiOr run it once without installing:

bunx @ahmd-sh/hntuihntuiPress q (or Ctrl-C) to quit.

hntui updateChecks the latest release and, for binary installs, replaces itself in place. Bun installs update with bun add -g @ahmd-sh/hntui instead (hntui update will tell you so). When a newer release exists, the status bar shows a quiet hint. hntui --version prints the installed version.

Most things you can do with the keyboard, you can do with a mouse too.

- Click a tab to switch feeds.

- Click the Ytile to refresh the current feed (or to exit a story back to its list).

- Click any story row to select it. Click it again to open the comments.

- Right-click a story to open a context menu with Save, Open URL, and Open Comments.

- Click a comment's header line to collapse or expand its subtree.

- Double-click a comment's body to open its links popup.

- Click the story URL in the detail header to open it in your browser.

- Click outside a popup or context menu to dismiss it.

- Use your scroll wheel to scroll lists and comment trees.

Because the app captures mouse events, your terminal's normal click-and-drag selection is intercepted. To select text the regular way:

- On macOS (Terminal.app, iTerm2, WezTerm, Ghostty), hold Optionwhile you drag, thenCmd-C.

- On Linux (Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, GNOME Terminal), hold Shiftwhile you drag, thenCtrl-Shift-C.

Press t to toggle. The dark theme is mostly black with orange accents. The light theme is faithful to news.ycombinator.com: white background, orange topbar, the familiar beige row highlight, and HN's classic grey byline text.

Press s on any story to save it. Saved posts get a small star next to the title and show up in the Saved tab on the right side of the tab strip. The list persists across sessions in ~/.config/hntui/saved.json as a small JSON file. (Config from the app's hackernuis days is migrated automatically on first run.) Press s again to remove a post from the list.

S jumps straight to the Saved list from anywhere.

git clone https://github.com/ahmd-sh/hntui.git

cd hntui

bun install

bun dev # hot reloadData comes from the public Hacker News Firebase API.

Pushing a v* tag triggers two workflows:

- .github/workflows/release.ymlcross-compiles standalone binaries (- bun build --compile) for macOS and Linux (arm64 and x64), smoke-tests the Linux build against the live API, and attaches the tarballs to a GitHub release. This is what- install.shdownloads.

- .github/workflows/publish.ymlpublishes- @ahmd-sh/hntuito npm via OIDC trusted publishing, with a SLSA provenance attestation linking the tarball back to the exact commit and workflow run that produced it. It skips gracefully if the version is already on npm.

To release a new version:

npm version patch # or minor / major

git push --follow-tags- OpenTUI by Anomaly. The native TUI core that makes all of this possible.

- opentui-spinner by Matt Simpson. The Knight Rider loading scanner is adapted from examples/knight-rider/utils.ts(MIT).

- Effect for empowering the data layer under the hood.

- Hacker News for the content and the open API.