Native Hacker News TUI client with AI comments summary written in Golang

Developer cw has released cwnews, a terminal-based Hacker News reader built in Go using Bubbletea v2, featuring AI-powered comment thread summarization via DeepSeek V4 Flash. The tool caches data in SQLite, supports six HN feeds, threaded comment folding, and three themes, aiming to provide a fast, keyboard-driven browsing experience with real-time AI summaries.

cwnews A fast terminal Hacker News reader with threaded comment folding, score-coloured story lists, three themes, and AI-powered thread summarization via DeepSeek V4 Flash. Built in Go on Bubbletea v2. Left panel browses stories across all six HN feeds Top / New / Best / Ask / Show / Jobs with pagination. Right panel renders nested comments with collapsible threads, coloured depth indent, and summary panel streaming live from DeepSeek. Ask · Show · Jobs Zinc cyan streaming thread summary What it is cwnews is a full-screen Bubbletea TUI for reading Hacker News on the terminal. It fetches stories and comments from the official HN Firebase API, caches everything in SQLite for instant re-opening, and provides real-time AI summaries of comment threads with word-by-word streaming. The left panel is a dense story browser: six feed tabs, pagination with n / p , and score- and comment-count coloured metadata. Titles truncate cleanly to fit. The right panel shows a threaded comment view with collapsible nesting, coloured depth bars, and a cursor that highlights the active comment in accent orange. Press s on any thread and DeepSeek V4 Flash streams a detailed summary — sentiment, key points, standout quotes, consensus & debate — formatted with markdown headings, bullet points, and italicized blockquotes. Summaries are cached in SQLite, so switching back to a thread is instant. Language is configurable Chinese or English . The three themes cycle with t : a dark HN-inspired palette with orange accents, a classic cream-background HN look matching the real website, and a cyan-accented zinc theme from cwmail's design system. Why it’s different Enter or ← to collapse any thread, → to expand, / to fold by depth level, n / N to jump between top-level comments. Vim-style j / k navigation moves a highlighted cursor through the visible list. s and the right panel switches to an AI summary view. DeepSeek V4 Flash streams text word-by-word with a braille spinner in the status bar. Summaries cover overall sentiment, key points, standout comment quotes, consensus & debate breakdowns, and meta-observations. All cached in SQLite — reopen any thread and the summary appears instantly without another API call. h / l or direct 1 - 6 keys. Each feed loads 50 stories per page from the 500-item HN ID pool. n / p paginates; the page indicator shows 1/17 in the tab bar. Switching feeds resets to page one. ' , <p . cwnews decodes all HTML entities and strips tags before rendering, so you never see ' or raw <p markers in comment text. ~/.local/share/cwnews/cwnews.db . Re-opening a previously viewed thread shows comments immediately while a background refresh fetches any new replies. Cached summaries mean the AI panel is instant on the second press of s . What it looks like Install Download a pre-built binary from the Google Drive release folder https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10u8t-tPC0cPRsGpCwaCniqqbzMxLDcb2?usp=sharing current build: v0.1; macOS arm64 / amd64 and Windows amd64 . Drop it somewhere on your PATH and make it executable: macOS curl -L <download-url -o ~/.local/bin/cwnews chmod +x ~/.local/bin/cwnews Windows PowerShell Invoke-WebRequest <download-url -OutFile cwnews.exe Create a config file at ./config.json or ~/.config/cwnews/config.json : { "theme": "hn", "ai": { "api key": "sk-...", "model": "deepseek-v4-flash", "summary language": "zh" }, "ui": { "sidebar width ratio": 0.40 }, "cache ttl minutes": 5 } Set "summary language" to "en" for English summaries or "zh" for Chinese. The AI API key is the same DeepSeek key used by cwcode and cwmail. Run it. cwnews FAQ s for a summary. t to cycle through three themes: hn dark, orange accents , hn-classic cream background, matches real HN , and zinc cyan-accented dark . The active theme shows in the footer. j / k to navigate, g / G for top/bottom, d / u for half-page scroll, h / l to switch feeds, Enter to open a story and focus comments, Tab to switch between panels, q to quit. The footer bar in each view shows the context-relevant keys. Google Drive https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10u8t-tPC0cPRsGpCwaCniqqbzMxLDcb2?usp=sharing . Source currently private. Reach out at haojng@gmail.com mailto:haojng@gmail.com for access.