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