RTV: Reddit Terminal Viewer

RTV allows you to view and interact with reddit from your terminal.

It's compatible with most terminal emulators on Linux and OSX.

Demo

RTV is built in python using the curses library.

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• Installation

• Usage

• Configuration

• FAQ

• Changelog

• License

Installation

Install using pip

$ pip install rtv

or clone the repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv.git
$ cd rtv
$ python3 setup.py install

See the FAQ for troubleshooting.

Usage

$ rtv --help

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

Press up and down to scroll through submissions.

Press right to view the selected submission and left to return.

Press ? to open the help screen.

See CONTROLS.rst for the complete list of available commands.

Configuration

Editor

You can compose posts and reply to comments using your preferred text editor. Set the editor by changing $RTV_EDITOR in your environment.

$ export RTV_EDITOR=gedit

If not specified, the default system $EDITOR (or nano) will be used.

Web Browser

You can open submission links using your web browser. On most systems the default web browser will open in a new window. If you prefer the complete terminal experience, set $BROWSER to a console-based web browser.

$ export BROWSER=w3m

w3m, lynx, and elinks are all good choices.

Authentication

RTV enables you to login to your reddit account in order to perform actions like voting and leave comments. The login process uses OAuth [1] and follows these steps:

1. Initiate a login by pressing the u key.

2. Open a new webpage where reddit will ask you to authorize the application.

3. Click Accept.

RTV will retrieve an auth token with your information and store it locally in {HOME}/.config/rtv/refresh-token. You can disable storing the token by setting persistent=False in the config.

Note that RTV no longer allows you to input your username/password directly. This method of cookie based authentication has been deprecated by reddit [2].

[1]

https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/OAuth2

[2]

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/2ujhkr/important_api_licensing_terms_clarified/

Config File

Configuration settings are stored in {HOME}/.config/rtv/rtv.cfg. Auto-generate the config file by running

$ rtv --copy-config

See the default config for a list of settings.

FAQ

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

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 rtv using python 3. If you don't already have pip3, see http://stackoverflow.com/a/6587528 for setup instructions. Then do

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

How do I run the repository code directly?

This project is structured to be run as a python module. This means that in order to resolve imports you need to launch using python's -m flag. This method works for all versions of python. See the example below, which assumes that you have cloned the repository into the directory ~/rtv_project.

$ cd ~/rtv_project
$ python3 -m rtv

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG.rst.

License

This project is distributed under the MIT license.