Motivation
Usually when I consume my daily news feeds, I prefer to keep context switching to a minimum. Whether you’re a busy professional or just someone who values their time, you might want to streamline your online reading experience as much as possible. For me, this means sticking to Emacs and using tools like elfeed and pocket-reader to stay on top of my reading list.
Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work with content served within comments at Hackernews or Reddit, where you usually have lots of comments and discussion threads. This is where I began to struggle, as I found myself bouncing back and forth between Emacs and my browser in order to stay on top of the conversation.
Luckily, I’ve found hnreader and reddigg which have changed the way I consume content on these platforms. These packages are specifically designed to help you navigate and read through Hackernews and Reddit threads directly from within Emacs, saving you from the hassle of constantly switching between different apps and tabs.
In my opinion these are the most underrated packages and in this post I’d like to show you how they can help you improve your reading experience. By the end of this post, you’ll have a better understanding of how to use hnreader and reddiggto read and navigate through even the most complex Hackernews and Reddit threads, all without ever having to leave the comfort of Emacs.
hnreader
Without any customizations you can use hnreader
straightaway. Currently you have following options:
Invoking each function will return a buffer with the latest 30 posts in that category:
Let’s have a look how we can add customized behaviour.
Basic functions
The easiest way to show comments for a thread ID is to use
(hnreader-readpage-promise "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433")
This will create a new buffer and load the readpage for that specific HN URL
(hnreader-promise-comment "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433")
This will create a new buffer and load all comments from this specific Hackernews thread:
elfeed integrations
Whenever you have a Hackernews specific link inside your buffer you may want to open it using:
You can of course call a function from the elfeed-search
buffer to show the HN threads:
And these are my elfeed
related keybindings:
reddigg
reddigg is the similar solution for reddit. When invoked directly you have these options:
After invoking reddigg-view-frontpage
you’ll get a new buffer with the last posts:
(defun my/elfeed-reddit-show-commments (&optional link)
(interactive)
(let* ((entry (if (eq major-mode 'elfeed-show-mode)
elfeed-show-entry
(elfeed-search-selected :ignore-region)))
(link (if link link (elfeed-entry-link entry))))
(reddigg-view-comments link)))
elfeed integration
We can also use reddigg
to show reddit threads from within an elfeed
buffer
And my related keybindings:
When invoked you’ll get an ORG mode styled buffer with all the comments for a specific reddit thread:
Conclusion
I hope you’re as enthusiastic as I am. And if you have any better alternatives, please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments.
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