tuir 1.29.0

A simple terminal viewer for Reddit (Terminal UI for Reddit)

Terminal UI for Reddit (TUIR)

A text-based interface (TUI) to view and interact with Reddit from your terminal.

TUIR is a fork of rtv, which was maintained by Michael Lazar in this repository until Jun 3, 2019.

Table of Contents

• Demo
• Installation
• Usage
• Settings
• Themes
• FAQ
• Contributing
• License

Demo

Installation

PyPI package

TUIR is available on PyPI and can be installed with pip:

$ pip install tuir

Migration from RTV

If you are migrating from RTV to TUIR, you can simply rename your old config directory/config file:

$ mv ~/.config/rtv ~/.config/tuir
$ mv ~/.config/tuir/rtv.cfg ~/.config/tuir/tuir.cfg

Please take care to use the new API keys for Imgur and Reddit. To replace with sed:

$ sed -i 's/E2oEtRQfdfAfNQ/zjyhNI7tK8ivzQ/; s/93396265f59dec9/b33d69ac8931734/' ~/.config/tuir/tuir.cfg

Distro packages

See Repology for an up-to-date list of supported distro packages.

Arch

TUIR is available from the AUR with the package name TUIR.

From source

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir.git
$ cd tuir
$ python setup.py install

Windows

TUIR is not supported on Windows, due to a lack of resources and interest. Sorry!

Usage

To run the program, type:

$ tuir --help

Controls

Move the cursor using either the arrow keys or Vim style movement:

• Press ▲ and ▼ to scroll through submissions
• Press ▶ to view the selected submission and ◀ to return
• Press space-bar to expand/collapse comments
• Press u to login (this requires a web browser for OAuth)
• Press ? to open the help screen

Press / to open the navigation prompt, where you can type things like:

• /front
• /r/commandprompt+linuxmasterrace
• /r/programming/controversial
• /u/me
• /u/multi-mod/m/art
• /domain/github.com

See CONTROLS for the full list of commands.

Settings

Configuration File

Configuration files are stored in the {HOME}/.config/tuir/ directory.

Check out tuir.cfg for the full list of configurable options. You can clone this file into your home directory by running:

$ tuir --copy-config

Viewing Media Links

You can use mailcap to configure how TUIR will open different types of links.

A mailcap file allows you to associate different MIME media types, like image/jpeg or video/mp4, with shell commands. This feature is disabled by default because it takes a few extra steps to configure. To get started, copy the default mailcap template to your home directory.

$ tuir --copy-mailcap

This template contains examples for common MIME types that work with popular reddit websites like imgur, youtube, and gfycat. Open the mailcap template and follow the instructions listed inside.

Once you've setup your mailcap file, enable it by launching tuir with the tuir --enable-media flag (or set it in your tuir.cfg)

Environment Variables

The default programs that TUIR interacts with can be configured through environment variables:

$TUIR_EDITOR	A program used to compose text submissions and comments, e.g. vim, emacs, gedit If not specified, will fallback to $VISUAL and $EDITOR in that order.
$TUIR_BROWSER	A program used to open links to external websites, e.g. firefox, google-chrome, w3m, lynx If not specified, will fallback to $BROWSER, or your system's default browser.
$TUIR_URLVIEWER	A tool used to extract hyperlinks from blocks of text, e.g. urlview, urlscan If not specified, will fallback to urlview if it is installed.

Clipboard

TUIR supports copying submission links to the OS clipboard. Data being copied is piped into a command specified by the configuration option clipboard_cmd. If this option is not set, the command will default to pbcopy w on Darwin systems (OSX), and xclip -selection clipboard on Linux.

Themes

Themes can be used to customize the look and feel of TUIR

Solarized Dark	Solarized Light
Papercolor	Molokai

You can list all installed themes with the --list-themes command, and select one with --theme. You can save your choice permanently in your tuir.cfg file. You can also use the F2 & F3 keys inside of TUIR to cycle through all available themes.

For instructions on writing and installing your own themes, see THEMES.md.

FAQ

Why am I getting an error during installation/when launching tuir?

If your distro ships with an older version of python 2.7 or python-requests, you may experience SSL errors or other package incompatibilities. The easiest way to fix this is to install tuir using python 3. If you don't already have pip3, see http://stackoverflow.com/a/6587528 for setup instructions. Then do

$ sudo pip uninstall tuir
$ sudo pip3 install -U tuir

Why do I see garbled text like M-b~@M-" or ^@?

This type of text usually shows up when python is unable to render unicode properly.

1. Try starting TUIR in ascii-only mode with tuir --ascii
2. Make sure that the terminal/font that you're using supports unicode
3. Try setting the LOCALE to utf-8
4. Your python may have been built against the wrong curses library, see here and here for more information

How do I run the code directly from the repository?

This project is structured to be run as a python module. This means that you need to launch it using python's -m flag. See the example below, which assumes that you have cloned the repository into the directory ~/tuir_project.

$ cd ~/tuir_project
$ python3 -m tuir

Current development status

TUIR currently depends on Michael Lazar's (maintainer of RTV) fork of PRAW being packaged with the program. Michael's fork is a fork from PRAW version 3.6.1, which is currently unsupported. Further, packaged dependencies aren't looked upon fondly by various distribution's packaging guidelines (#11, Gentoo Wiki - Why not bundle dependencies). Due to this, I'm working to update TUIR to a more recent PRAW version which isn't bundled.

There is significant API breakage from PRAW 3 to PRAW 6 (the PRAW README calls PRAW 4 a "complete rewrite"). As such, updating TUIR to use a PRAW multiple major versions newer is slow going. I am a relatively inexperienced developer and I have less time than I'd like to devote to software. This work is in branch update_unbundle_praw (link), so there may not be super recent commits in master, but that doesn't mean I'm neglecting TUIR. Unfortunately, this does mean I am not actively working on feature requests. They are always welcome of course, but it would be far simpler to add features after TUIR is converted to using PRAW 6 instead of adding them now and dealing with their breakage later.

Python 2 is also dead as of 2020. PRAW 6 doesn't even support Python 2, so Python 2 support in TUIR is also being dropped. Given that PRAW3 is packaged with TUIR as a result of RTV doing the same, there is little sense in removing Python 2 support from the packaged version when there is already an updated version of PRAW available, so I will work to remove Python 2 support alongside my efforts to update TUIR for PRAW 6.

Contributing

All feedback and suggestions are welcome, just post an issue!

Before writing any code, please read the Contributor Guidelines.

License

This project is distributed under the MIT license.