Caret

Published by FIGBERT on
< Back

Caret is a command line tool for browsing Lobsters in your terminal. It brings the Hacker News alternative just a few keystrokes away in the environment that you’re probably already using.

A view of the Lobsters homepage in Caret

Caret is heavily inspired by the excellent circumflex. It attempts to emulate much of the same functionality with a much simpler implementation, using the Charm open-source libraries. Caret relies on Lobsters’ unofficial JSON API, and will adjust to changes in this potentially volatile source of data as needed.

Caret is debatably a tangible deliverable. I developed it before I announced this intention, but the announcement has been long delayed, so who knows.

Two side-by-side views of Caret in use

Many programmers—myself included—practically live in the terminal. It’s a fast-paced, information-dense environment. Caret brings Lobsters to meet its readers where they are, and enables readers to navigate the site quickly and effectively in a manner familiar to them.

Compile Caret from the source code on my forge and give it a go (no pun intended) in your terminal.