hdlns: It’s the simple tools that impress most

While Peter was helping me get heirloom-mailx running, he also pointed out a script called hdlns that is well worth checking out.

hdlns — I’m guessing it’s pronounced “headlines” — scrapes the UK, US or international editions of the BBC News for major stories, then gives a quick blurb and a link, if you want.

Very neatly arranged, nicely presented with enough options to be functional without suffering from feature creep. And if you’re not a huge RSS user — like me — this is preferable to installing an entire application to get a note or two about world events.

My only complaint would be that there seems no way to adjust the output to fill the terminal space. As you can see, I could include quite a few more entries if the entire width of the screen were used.

A minor point, and not one worth wringing my hands over.

And really, if you’re at all talented at coding, you might want to take a look at the guts of hdlns. I don’t know proper code from lorem ipsum, but the inside of hdlns has the look of a finely tuned automobile. 😯

Simple tools like this are well worth keeping around. 😉

P.S.: Arch users might need to install par to get this to run. Other dependencies are listed in the script comments; I only needed to install that one to get it working.