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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Story list

Key Action

j / ↓, k / ↑ Move cursor

gg, G Jump to first or last

Ctrl-D, Ctrl-U, PgDown, PgUp Scroll a half page

c, Enter Open the story and read its comments

h / ←, l / → Previous or next tab

Tab, Shift-Tab Cycle through tabs

1 through 6 Jump to a specific category

S Jump to the Saved list

s Save or unsave the highlighted post

o Open the story's URL in your browser

r Refresh the current feed

t Toggle theme

q, Ctrl-C Quit

Story detail (comments)

Key Action

j / ↓, k / ↑ Move the comment cursor

gg, G Jump to first or last comment

Ctrl-D, Ctrl-U, PgDown, PgUp Scroll a half page

Space Collapse or expand the current subtree

Enter Open the links popup for the current comment

s Save or unsave this story

o Open the story's URL

Esc, Backspace, h / ← Back to the list

t Toggle theme

q Quit

Links popup

Key Action

j, k, ↑, ↓ Move

gg, G First or last link

o, Enter Open the highlighted link

Esc, Backspace Close the popup

Context menu (right-click)

Key Action

j / ↓, k / ↑ Move

Enter Activate

Esc, Backspace Close

Mouse

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

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

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 reload

Data comes from the public Hacker News Firebase API.

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.