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Show HN: bbcli – A TUI and CLI to browse BBC News like a hacker

Show HN: bbcli – A TUI and CLI to browse BBC News like a hacker

12 comments

·October 19, 2025

hey hn!

I (re)built this TUI tool for browsing BBC News in the terminal, it uses an RSS feed for getting headlines and previews and you can read articles too.

Try it out and let me know what you think! :)

wef

I have an almost identical RSS experience using emacs+elfeed+firefox but with the added bonus of being able to filter out articles (eg sport) that I'm not interested in. Plus I can read many other feeds beyond BBC.

teunlao

This is the kind of tool that actually gets used daily, well done!

esafak

It might be before your time, but if you want some bonus points emulate Ceefax:

https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/51354070.jpg [edited]

folmar

The link is payload, maybe you could link to a concrete image or some free search engine?

k1t

https://nmsceefax.co.uk/ for a live browser-based example.

alberth

Very cool.

Would be interesting to hear why this over a general purpose text-based browser like Lynx.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

NoboruWataya

If you actually try access bbc.co.uk using Lynx, you'll see it's just not a great experience. Most modern websites are not made with text-based browsers in mind at all, and the HTML (and other stuff) they are made of does not lend itself to easy or intuitive display in the terminal.

This seems more akin to an RSS reader than a general web browser.

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GaryBluto

You don't want to get put on trial for computer misuse, do you? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2005/oct/07/manf...

devrundown

I always like seeing new TUI tools, nice work!

SwiftyBug

Me too! I found a few nice ones in the App Showcase page in the Ratatui website: https://ratatui.rs/showcase/apps/

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