browse · download · search · publish · analyze — all from the command line.

zhihu-cli turns your terminal into a full-featured Zhihu client. Authenticate once, then browse, search, download, publish, and analyze — without ever opening a browser.

⚠️ This is an unofficial CLI for Zhihu. Use at your own risk. Not affiliated with Zhihu Inc.

🚀 Quick Start

Requirement: Python 3.12 or newer. Check your version with python --version before installing.

# Install
pip install -e .

# Optional extras
pip install -e ".[nlp]"          # word clouds, clustering
pip install -e ".[creator]"      # income charts, trends
pip install -e ".[classifier]"   # ML-powered content classification

1. Authenticate

zhihu auth paste          # paste a cURL from browser DevTools
zhihu auth login          # scan a QR code with the Zhihu App

2. Verify

zhihu auth status         # check login status and active profile

✨ What You Can Do

📖 Read & Browse

Browse Zhihu's feeds, hot lists, questions, articles, pins, and comments — all rendered in your terminal with a Rich-powered pager. Explore the real-time trending list with excerpts, scroll through your personalized recommend feed, or dive into a question and its full answer thread without clicking a single link.

💾 Download for Offline

Save any Zhihu content (articles, answers, questions, pins, videos) as clean Markdown with YAML frontmatter. Download individual pieces or batch-process from a manifest. Everything lands in ~/.zhihu-cli/downloads/, organized by type, ready for your note-taking system or offline reading.

🔍 Search

Search questions, articles, users, and topics across Zhihu. Fine-tune result depth and quantity — all from the command line.

✍️ Publish & Edit

Write answers and articles in Markdown, publish them to Zhihu with one command. Need to update? Modify existing answers and articles from your local files. Markdown-to-HTML conversion happens automatically via Zhihu's own rendering pipeline.

💬 Interact

Vote, thank, follow, block, and comment — full social interaction without the browser. Manage collections: create, populate, and organize them. Send and receive direct messages, and stream real-time notifications and chat via MQTT.

🕸️ Scrape & Export

Batch-export your creations, activity history, answers, and articles as structured JSON. Use the universal converter to merge and normalize across formats for your own data pipeline.

📊 Analyze

Creator analytics — pull your Zhihu income data and visualize it: monthly summaries, trend charts (with EMA), advanced indicators (Bollinger Bands, MACD), derivative analysis (velocity/acceleration/jerk), weekday breakdowns, and per-content daily metrics. Charts are saved as PNGs.

NLP tools — run word frequency analysis, generate word clouds, and perform K-means clustering on your downloaded content. All operate across your full Markdown library.

🔐 Multi-Account

Save multiple profiles from different accounts, switch between them with a single command. Each profile keeps its own auth credentials and cookies.

🏗️ Architecture

src/zhihu_cli/
├── main.py                  # Click CLI — command group hub
├── output.py                # styled terminal output (Rich)
├── content/
│   ├── handlers/            # one file per Zhihu domain
│   └── utils/               # HTML↔Markdown, ZSE v4 signing
├── creator_tools/           # income analytics + plotting
├── nlp_tools/               # word count, wordcloud, clustering
└── extensions/              # plugin system (auto-discovered)

🧪 Extras

Optional Dependencies

pip install -e ".[nlp]"          # jieba, matplotlib, wordcloud, scikit-learn...
pip install -e ".[creator]"      # matplotlib, numpy, pandas, seaborn...
pip install -e ".[classifier]"   # torch, transformers, scikit-learn...

Shell Completions

eval "$(python autocomp.py)"

🤝 Contributing

PRs welcome! The codebase is structured for extensibility:

• New command? Add a file to commands/ with a register_<name>(group) function, import it in main.py.
• New handler? Add a file to content/handlers/ — follow the existing patterns.
• New extension? Create extensions/<name>/ with an __init__.py exposing register_cli(group).

Run the formatter before submitting:

pre-commit run --all-files
ruff check .
ruff format .

📜 License

MIT