Show HN: bbcli – A TUI and CLI to browse BBC News like a hacker

83•wesleyhill•3mo ago

hey hn!

I (re)built this TUI tool for browsing BBC News in the terminal, it uses an RSS feed for getting headlines and previews and you can read articles too.

Try it out and let me know what you think! :)

Comments

devrundown•3mo ago

I always like seeing new TUI tools, nice work!

SwiftyBug•3mo ago

Me too! I found a few nice ones in the App Showcase page in the Ratatui website: https://ratatui.rs/showcase/apps/

esafak•3mo ago

It might be before your time, but if you want some bonus points emulate Ceefax:

https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/51354070.jpg [edited]

folmar•3mo ago

The link is payload, maybe you could link to a concrete image or some free search engine?

k1t•3mo ago

https://nmsceefax.co.uk/ for a live browser-based example.

LeoPanthera•3mo ago

Done. https://nmsceefax.co.uk

alberth•3mo ago

Very cool.

Would be interesting to hear why this over a general purpose text-based browser like Lynx.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

GaryBluto•3mo ago

You don't want to get put on trial for computer misuse, do you? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2005/oct/07/manf...

fragmede•3mo ago

https://boingboing.net/2005/10/06/guy-who-was-busted-f.html/... was the best link I could find for that story

RestartKernel•3mo ago

My own government luckily even offers to reach out in your stead if a company doesn't respond to your disclosure, so pen testing random websites seems implicitly allowed, but such a vertict is still scary to read for such an innocuous probe.

NoboruWataya•3mo ago

If you actually try access bbc.co.uk using Lynx, you'll see it's just not a great experience. Most modern websites are not made with text-based browsers in mind at all, and the HTML (and other stuff) they are made of does not lend itself to easy or intuitive display in the terminal.

This seems more akin to an RSS reader than a general web browser.

wef•3mo ago

I have an almost identical RSS experience using emacs+elfeed+firefox but with the added bonus of being able to filter out articles (eg sport) that I'm not interested in. Plus I can read many other feeds beyond BBC.

teunlao•3mo ago

This is the kind of tool that actually gets used daily, well done!

jbverschoor•3mo ago

Three reasons for TUIs:

Speed of rendering

Consistency / limited styles

Keyboard controls

It is possible to achieve this other ways. But what’s interesting that for example Visual Basic or Borland C use a windowing concept

z3ratul163071•3mo ago

a real hacker would never consume that propaganda slop

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