hntui: Hacker News in your terminal!

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

What it does

• 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◕⁠ )

Requirements

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.

Install

Standalone binary (recommended)

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

Installs 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.

With Bun

bun add -g @ahmd-sh/hntui

Or run it once without installing:

bunx @ahmd-sh/hntui

Run

hntui

Press q (or Ctrl-C) to quit.

Updating

hntui update

Checks 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.

Keybindings

Story list

Story detail (comments)

Links popup

Context menu (right-click)

Mouse

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

• Click a tab to switch feeds.
• Click the Y tile 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.

Selecting and copying text

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 Option while you drag, then Cmd-C.
• On Linux (Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, GNOME Terminal), hold Shift while you drag, then Ctrl-Shift-C.

Themes

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.

Saved posts

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.

Development

git clone https://github.com/ahmd-sh/hntui.git
cd hntui
bun install
bun dev    # hot reload

Data comes from the public Hacker News Firebase API.

Releases

Pushing a v* tag triggers two workflows:

• .github/workflows/release.yml cross-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.sh downloads.
• .github/workflows/publish.yml publishes @ahmd-sh/hntui to 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

Acknowledgments

• 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.

License

MIT, Copyright (c) 2026 Ahmed Shaikh.