How about automated updates every minute or so?
Usually I keep these windows open in the background and look at what pops up.
I'm coding something similar for nostr events. Might add HN too keep different feeds on the same TUI location. Text is less distractive than these modern crafts of devil called CSS and god-forbid: images.
Always nice to see text consoles coming back.
Scoring rules would let individuals define rules for how thread subtrees and siblings are ordered, highlighted, and hidden. For example, comments by a particular user you like bump up the ordering priority for that comment, and also maybe some boost to the tree above it. And some keyword you think tends to happen in threads you don't like adds a negative score to that subtree, and maybe it hits a threshold causing it to be hidden (though the positive score from that user you like participating might save it, with you thinking that maybe they'd step into a flamewar and say something smart). And, separate from rules you defined, you could also manually hit a key to raise or lower a post or subtree (which could be used as an alternative to the earlier feature to say hide a subtree no matter whether more comments are made on it, like you might do for a flamewar).
I was hoping to use it with one of my retro machines, and got
use_default_colors() returned ERR
The Unix ethos used to be "run anywhere on anything," but even basic programs like top assume a window of a certain size.
Similarly, Lynx markets itself as being for retro environments, but a number of its flags that would be useful in retro environments are ignored/broken.
Surprisingly (to me), htop is very well-behaved, and works even in tiny windows, or on tiny monochrome screens.
There's more to retro than just being text.
I've just added support for ascii & monochrome modes, and reduced the required screen size to 80x12, which I think is a reasonable minimum for readability.
Would you mind sharing what kind of hardware did you try it on?
Remember that 80 column screens were not the majority of computers in what we now consider the retro age. 40, 36, and even 32 columns screens were common.
Also, terminals would often have status bars, reducing the amount of vertical real estate. 12 sounds small, but with status indicators active, you're looking at 10 or even 8 usable lines.
Is it possible to launch a browser for writing replys/comments?
In every message you can see its URL in the Content-Location header.
You can press 'o' to select it and open in a browser, and you can select the browser with the BROWSER env var.
Although many terminals have built-in support for simply clicking on URLs, and that's what I usually do.
Why not an NNTP gateway?
NNTP doesn't support browsing threads by title (let alone paginated) and requesting their messages on demand. Clients need to fetch metadata of all available messages in all available threads in advance. Given the volume of messages on HN, synchronizing them to the gateway is not practical. Even when attempted, some clients struggle with the sheer number of messages in a single group.
I always liked USENET news for its "pull" approach, and for the same reason hated email newsletters. The threaded discussions via Emacs GNUS were a delight, and modern Web-based forum solutions are distractive and never respect my font/color settings; plus, they also diff in UX.
Now 80x25 was the standard text mode of IBM PC, which I'm much more familiar with. I used it because I was testing (over telnet) on some retro ones.
TRS-80, TI-99, Commodore, Apple etc. home computers had 32, 40, maybe 64 columns and you could get terminal emulator programs for them but most people would use them for CompuServ or America Online, or maybe BBS logins. I think I tried using my TI-99 terminal emulator with a unix host and it wasn't very successful. The host had no idea what my terminal was and operated in a very limited "dumb tty" mode.