Linkulator, a link aggregator for the shell

Linkulator is a command line link aggregator; somewhat like news.ycombinator.com, or lobste.rs, but simpler and run from the command line.

Designed for multi-user systems like rawtext.club, each user's links and comments are stored in their home directory, and are compiled for viewing when Linkulator is started.

user@server:~$ linkulator
 ----------
 LINKULATOR
 ----------

 ID#  New  Category                 
   1   x   non-commercial www (9)
   2   x   how to (1)
   3       data (1)
   4       software (2)
   5       pubnixes (8)
   6       music (2)
   7       test (13)
   8       programming languages (7)
   9       search engines (4)

Enter a category ID, p to post a link, s to search, or q to quit: 

Prerequisites

Linkulator requires Python 3.6.9 or greater. If you use an earlier version, you may get the following error:

  File "./linkulator.py", line 21
    link_data: list = LinkData.link_data
             ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Installation

Just clone this repo into any location in users' paths. Each user can have their own copy, in case they want to customize it, or you can install a central version in /usr/local/bin.

On most systems, the default configurations should just work (tm), but follow the config steps below if not.

Configuration

Default Path settings

In the case where you have a custom location for user home directories, or want to change where Linkulator stores user data, Linkulator's default settings can be easily changed to support this. The following options are found in the file config.py in the class DefaultPaths.

User home directory location

String all_homedir_pattern

Customise user home directory hierarchy. Default is /home/*/ to support a standard structure like /home/username/

For example, you may have home directories in a location like /userdata/(first letter)/(username) i.e. /userdata/a/auser. The glob pattern would need to be updated to /userdata/i*/*/

Data directory name

String datadir

Customise the name of the directory where user data is stored. Default is .linkulator.

Data file

String datafile

Customise the name of the file where user links and replies are stored. Default is linkulator.data

Ignore file

String ignorefile

Customise the name of the file where ignored users are stored. Default is ignore

Settings file

String settingsfile

Customise the name of the file where user settings are stored. Default is linkulatorrc

Default User settings

To change the default settings for users of the system, amend the following options found in config.py in the class DefaultUser

Default browser

String browser

Customise the command used to execute the default browser used by linkulator. Default is lynx

User settings

Users can select their preferred browser by changing the browser setting in their settings file (default is $HOME/.linkulator/linkulatorrc).

For example, to change from lynx to w3m:

[User Settings]
browser = w3m

Contributing

Issues, questions and requests for new features can be reported using the tildegit issues system.

License

This software is licensed using GPLv3 - see [LICENSE] for more information.