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

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.

6 feeds

Top · New · Best Ask · Show · Jobs

3 themes

HN dark · HN classic Zinc cyan

AI

DeepSeek V4 Flash 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

Threaded comment folding

Comments display as an indented tree with depth-coloured vertical bars. Press 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.

Streaming AI summaries

Press 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.

Score-colored rankings

Story scores color-code by heat: orange for 500+ points, warm amber for 200+, gold for 50+, dim gray for under 10. Comment counts follow the same scheme so hot discussions pop visually. Story headlines render in a single clean row with right-aligned ▲score and comment count columns that align across the entire page.

Six feeds with pagination

Tab bar at the top switches between Top, New, Best, Ask, Show, and Jobs feeds with 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.

HTML entity decoding

HN comments arrive as raw HTML with encoded entities (',

). cwnews decodes all HTML entities and strips tags before rendering, so you never see ' or raw

markers in comment text.

SQLite cache — always fast

Stories, comments, story-ID lists, and AI summaries all live in a single SQLite file at ~/.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

Main view — story list on the left (▲score + comment count), threaded comments on the right with fold controls and depth-coloured indent bars.

Install

Download a pre-built binary from the Google Drive release folder (current build: v0.1; macOS arm64 / amd64 and Windows amd64). Drop it somewhere on your PATH and make it executable:

macOS

curl -L -o ~/.local/bin/cwnews chmod +x ~/.local/bin/cwnews

Windows (PowerShell)

Invoke-WebRequest -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

Do I need a Hacker News account?

No. cwnews is read-only. It uses the free HN Firebase API. No login, no voting, no posting — just reading and AI summarization.

How much does the AI summary cost?

DeepSeek V4 Flash costs ~$0.14 per million input tokens and ~$0.28 per million output tokens. A typical thread summary uses about 15K input tokens (the comments) and produces 1-2K output tokens, so roughly $0.003 per summary. Cached summaries are free.

Does it work without an API key?

Yes. Everything except AI summarization works without a key. Browse stories, fold comments, change themes — the API key is only needed when you press s for a summary.

Can I change the theme?

Press 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.

What keybindings does it use?

Vim-style throughout: 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.

Is the source available?

Pre-built binaries on Google Drive. Source currently private. Reach out at [email protected] for access.

Does it work with cwcode?

Yes. cwcode can check HN headlines via cwnews, and the two share the same DeepSeek API key. Run them side-by-side in split tmux panes for a full terminal workstation.