Import old blog posts

_posts/2013-06-04-w3m-reddit.md

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+---
+title: w3m-reddit
+layout: post
+---
+
+I've been moving a lot of my daily tasks to the command-line lately, and that
+includes redditing. I probably spend far too much time on
+[reddit](http://reddit.com) as it is, but I really wanted to find an efficient
+way to view reddit through the command-line.  [w3m](http://w3m.sourceforge.net/)
+could render reddit okay, but I couldn't view my personal front-page because
+that required me to login to my profile.
+
+The solution was [cortex](http://cortex.glacicle.org/), a CLI app for viewing
+reddit.
+
+However, I kind of got tired of viewing reddit through w3m, the header alone is
+a few pages long to scroll through, and the CSS for the comments doesn't load so
+there isn't any sense of threading. But, then I discovered reddit's mobile
+website: [http://m.reddit.com](http://m.reddit.com), and it looks absolutely
+beautiful in w3m. In fact, I think I prefer it to the normal website in any
+modern browser; there are no distractions, just pure content.
+
+<a href="/static/img/w3m_mobile_reddit.png"><img src="/static/img/w3m_mobile_reddit.png" alt="m.reddit.com rendered in w3m"></a>
+
+In order to get cortex to open the mobile version of reddit, I made a bash
+script wrapper around w3m that takes urls and replaces `"http://reddit.com"` and
+`"http://www.reddit.com"` with `"http://m.reddit.com"` before passing them to
+w3m (as well as fixing a double forward slash error in the comment uri cortex
+outputs that desktop reddit accepts but mobile reddit 404s on). The script:
+
+    #!/bin/bash
+
+    args=()
+    until [ -z "$1" ]; do
+      case "$1" in
+        -t|--tmux) t=1; shift ;;
+        --) shift ; break ;;
+        -*) echo "invalid option $1" 1>&2 ; shift ;; # or, error and exit 1 just like getopt does
+        *) args+=("$1") ; shift ;;
+      esac
+    done
+
+    args+=("$@")
+    for arg in "${args[@]}" ; do
+        # Switch to mobile reddit
+        url=${arg/http:\/\/reddit.com/http:\/\/m.reddit.com}
+        url=${url/http:\/\/www.reddit.com/http:\/\/m.reddit.com}
+        # Fix double backslash error in comment uri for mobile reddit
+        url=${url/\/\/comments/\/comments}
+        if [[ $t == "1" ]]; then
+            tmux new-window 'w3m "'${url}'"'
+        else
+            w3m "${url}"
+        fi
+    done
+
+Since I regurally use [Tmux](http://tmux.sourceforge.net/) (with
+[Byobu](http://byobu.co/)), I also added an optional `-t`/`--tmux` switch that
+will open w3m in a temporary new tmux window that will close when w3m is closed.
+
+I saved the script as `w3m-reddit` and made it an executable command. In Ubuntu
+that's done with the following commands:
+
+    $ sudo mv w3m-reddit /usr/bin/
+    $ sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/w3m-reddit
+
+Now cortex needs to be configured to use `w3m-reddit`, and that's done by
+setting `browser-command` in the cortex config at `~/.cortex/config` to
+`w3m-reddit`:
+
+    ## Command to invoke the webbrowser
+    ## If left empty will try to autodetect the system default browser
+    ##browser-command=firefox '{0}'
+    browser-command=w3m-reddit '{0}'
+
+The result is a distraction-free reddit experience right in the command-line
+without having to edit cortex directly. I've found that I even prefer reddit
+this way. Without image thumbnails (I need to explicitly select the image links
+to view the image in w3m) I am more inclined to pay equal attention to every
+post, not just mindlessly scrolling through meme-fests. Thus I'm more focused
+and tend to not loose myself like I do in the infinite scrolling of [RES
+reddit](http://redditenhancementsuite.com/) in a GUI browser.
+
+There are still some improvements I could make to the w3m-reddit script. Namely,
+it should pass along any arguments to itself to w3m underneath. I'm still a
+newby at bash though, and I couldn't figure out an easy way to do that without
+scrapping the whole thing and starting over in Python instead.
+
+Stay tuned for more posts on how I view images and videos efficiently from the
+command-line.