// the find
michael-lazar/rtv
Browse Reddit from your terminal
RTV is a curses-based terminal UI for browsing and interacting with Reddit, written in Python. It supports voting, commenting, posting, OAuth login, and media viewing via mailcap. The project is explicitly abandoned as of 2019 (last code push is just doc updates), so this is historical territory.
- Unusually thorough test suite with VCR cassettes for all API interactions, making tests hermetic and fast without hitting Reddit's API
- Mailcap integration for media is a clever Unix-native approach that lets users wire in mpv, feh, youtube-dl, etc. without RTV needing to know about them
- Vendored a pinned version of PRAW inside rtv/packages/ to avoid dependency drift breaking things — pragmatic given Reddit API instability
- Theme system is well-structured with separate cfg files and runtime cycling via F2/F3, more polished than most TUI projects bother with
- Dead project: Reddit killed the API access model this relies on in 2023, so it functionally does not work anymore regardless of installation
- Bundles an ancient vendored PRAW (looks like ~3.x) instead of the modern praw 7.x, meaning any attempt to revive it requires significant API layer rewriting
- No Windows support by design, and the curses dependency makes porting non-trivial — rules out a large chunk of potential contributors who might want to revive it
- The OAuth flow opens a browser to complete, which is awkward for a terminal tool running over SSH and breaks the 'terminal-only' mental model