Using Reddit from the console in 2020

tuir

I’m going to horrify thousands of people out here when I say: I think reddit sucks. Specifically, I hate how horrid it looks. And yes, that’s after the new ‘facelifted’ reddit! The other day, I wanted to print out a page of comments from a subreddit. Before you tell me that it’s 2020 and I shouldn’t be printing stuff out anyway, I agree. But for this one exercise, it was really handy to have a printout. No matter what reader view plugin I used, or PDF conversion tool I opted for, the outcome was the same: either the reader couldn’t parse the page at all, or upon switching to classic view, I got a little more and I could at least print a page with Ctrl+P. Either way, it came out all over the place.

Most of the times with reddit, I pretty much just want the text. In fact, like many of you, I work at the command line for many hours of the day, so having a reddit client that would work on the command-line, and could also format the text in a completely readable way sounds pretty slick. Some of you may be aware of the CLI/curses based tool called RTV. Unfortunately the author decided to abandon the client some time back in 2019, so for a while, we’ve been without an up to date Linux command-line client. Have no fear, however. Based upon the look-and-feel of the RTV client comes TUIR (Terminal UI for Reddit) and TTRV (Tilde Terminal Reddit Viewer). At the moment, both apps are pretty much identical, so take your pick.

tuir demoRTV is still available in the Ubuntu repositories, however I’m not sure how long that will last, but at least for now, you can simply sudo apt install rtv.
Fortunately installation of TTRV or TUIR is trivial also. Simply do the following:

1) clone the git repos (eg: git clone https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir.git )
2) cd into their respectively cloned directory (eg, cd tuir)
3) run python3 setup.py install
4) run the binary, e.g. 'tuir' at the command prompt.

It looks pretty good. I’m happy with it, and making this grumpy old man happy is a big thing these days!

Finally, there is also an older app called Cortex, which I’m unsure if it’s being maintained any more, but it still has promise, if you want to try something else. Check out the Git Repo here.

Enjoy!

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