3.9 KiB
| title | layout |
|---|---|
| w3m-reddit | 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 as it is, but I really wanted to find an efficient way to view reddit through the command-line. w3m 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, 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, 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.
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 (with
Byobu), 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 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.