retronews

commit de1534a63756d766c85a92a7947efeb43240bc26
parent 0f9128220ecf3616862f591aac29a0eae606038d
Author: luke8086 <55237178+luke8086@users.noreply.github.com>
Date:   Sat, 17 Jun 2023 14:24:36 +0000

Overall updates to README

Diffstat:
M
README.md
 | 
50
+++++++++++++-------------------------------------

1 file changed, 13 insertions(+), 37 deletions(-)
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
 # retronews
 
 A Python script for browsing [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/)
-comments with an interface emulating classical usenet and mail readers,
-like slrn and mutt.
+and [Lobsters](https://lobste.rs/) discussions with an interface emulating
+classical usenet and mail readers, like slrn and mutt.
 
 It only requires Python 3.9 and doesn't need installation, you can run it with:
 
@@ -11,53 +11,29 @@ $ curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/luke8086/retronews/main/retronews.p
 $ python3 ./retronews.py
 ```
 
+Press `?` to see available keybindings.
+
 For rationale, see the corresponding [blog post](https://luke8086.neocities.org/retronews.html)
 
 <img src="screenshot.png" width="600" />
 
-## Default key bindings
-
-```
-  q                       Quit retronews
-  ?                       Show this help message
-  UP, DOWN                Go up / down by one message / pager line
-  PG UP, PG DOWN          Gp up / down by one page of messages / pager lines
-  p, n                    Go to previous / next message
-  N                       Go to next unread message
-  P                       Go to parent message
-  ; ,                     Set mark, jump to mark & swap (valid within thread)
-  RETURN, SPACE           Open selected message
-  x                       Close current message / thread
-  1 - 5                   Change group
-  R                       Refresh current page
-  < >                     Go to previous / next page
-  g                       Go to specific page
-  k j                     Scroll pager up / down by one line
-  s                       Star / unstar selected message
-  S                       Star / unstar current thread
-  r                       Toggle raw HTML mode
-```
-
 
 ## Known issues and limitations
 
-- The script is read-only, there are no plans to support voting and posting
-- The message renderer has glitches, but I prefer to keep it simple than solve
-  every corner case
+- The reader is read-only, there are no plans to support voting and posting
+- Message formatting is not perfect, but works well enough most of the time
+- Detecting if threads contain unread responses works by only checking their
+  amount, it's not reliable if any responses were deleted
 - No config file is planned, since the code is in Python, it's simpler to
   treat it as its own config and customize directly
 
 ## Why not a NNTP gateway?
 
-NNTP operates on a flat list of messages.
-The client asks for message headers N to M, uses them to draw a tree, and then
-asks one by one for the full content when messages are selected.
-There's no support for requesting a list of top-level messages first (let
-alone paginated), and fetching their responses only when individual threads are expanded.
-
-The gateway would need to download all threads to display at once, and since the
-underlying API can take several seconds per story, it'd be unacceptably slow.
-It also wouldn't be possible to request threads from older pages or specified by id.
+NNTP doesn't support browsing threads by title (let alone paginated) and requesting
+their messages on demand. Clients need to fetch metadata of all available messages
+in all available threads in advance. Given the volume of messages on HN, synchronizing
+them to the gateway is not practical. Even when attempted, some clients struggle
+with the amount of data in a single group.
 
 ## Related projects