What I really want is a reader view on the terminal -- something that cuts out all layout, formatting and images and shows me the raw article text in a fixed with font. Ditto for comments. I've already tried the "hn" [1] command line tool, but it doesn't strip out navigation menus, heads and footers from articles. It's also a bit slow.
> something that cuts out all layout, formatting and images and shows me the raw article text in a fixed with font.
FYI, I have implemented a reader view for `hackernews_tui v0.6.0` [0] which seems to satisfy most of the conditions above. Judging from my experience, this reader view works quite well and can cover many use cases.
I just played around with newspaper3k today, and it works really well out of the box.
I plan to add support for article view reader mode with newspaper3k integration. My current approach is to create a child process with `std::Process:Command` then run a python script. Doesn't seem to be the best approach, but I guess it's the easiest one.
That's why I like RSS. Strip out everything but the content and use whatever UI I prefer. Newsbeuter is a good RSS readers for the terminal. Several services and open source programs like TT-RSS allow you to get the full-text instead of just a blurb. And for sites without RSS feeds, there are services that make it easy to scrape HTML pages and output an RSS feed.
[1] https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news