// the find
bensadeh/circumflex
🌿 It's Hacker News in your terminal
A terminal UI for browsing Hacker News, written in Go using the Charm/Bubbletea stack. Read-only: you can browse stories, read comments with thread collapsing, view articles in a built-in reader mode, search via Algolia, and save favorites. Aimed at people who spend a lot of time in the terminal and are sick of context-switching to a browser.
- Article reader mode is genuinely useful — it pulls content through go-readability and renders it with syntax highlighting, LaTeX math, and even SVG/AVIF images via Kitty graphics protocol, which is well beyond what most TUI readers attempt.
- Test coverage is solid: golden file tests for comment and article rendering, a fuzz corpus for the HTML comment parser, and benchmarks for the comment rendering path. Not just happy-path unit tests.
- Config and theme are plain TOML files you can version-control, and favorites migrated automatically from JSON — shows some care for users upgrading across breaking changes.
- The module graph is disciplined: uses charm.land v2 (the newer Charm hosting) and resty v3, so it's tracking upstream actively rather than pinning ancient versions.
- Read-only is a hard constraint with no workaround — you can't upvote, comment, or flag from the tool. For a lot of HN users that's a dealbreaker and there's no sign it will ever be added.
- go 1.26 in go.mod is a pre-release version as of mid-2025, which will cause build failures on any toolchain before that release ships. Likely a mistake or the author is living on the edge.
- Depends on charm.land (not github.com/charmbracelet) for core TUI primitives — if charm.land CDN or vanity redirects have issues, `go get` breaks. This has bitten Charm ecosystem projects before.
- No offline mode or caching of stories — every launch hits the Firebase/Algolia APIs, so a flaky connection gives you a broken session with no graceful degradation to cached content.