Pretend to be productive by reading TechCrunch in your terminal window

Developers and hipsters, it’s time to join together and ditch your web browser to read this article. Kosuke Yoshimura developed a fun little project and shared it on Product Hunt today. TechCrunch-CLI is a command line interface that lets you read TechCrunch articles in text mode.

As my colleague Devin Coldewey suggested, TextCrunch would also be a good alternative name for this project.

I played around with it and I have to say that there’s something fascinating about reading the article I just published in my terminal window.

If you want to install it on your computer, it’s a simple NPM package on Github. If you have a Mac, you can install Node.js and NPM using Homebrew. Or you can spin up a Node.js image on any virtual private server platform out there if you just want to play with it for a few minutes.

By default, the command “$ tc top” loads up the most recent articles. It’s a scrollable list so you can go back quite far in the past with the up/down arrows. When you press enter, you get a text view of the article — links are included in brackets. Sadly, illustrations aren’t magically converted into ASCII art.

You can also type a tag using “$ tc tag <searchTerms...>” to load the most recent articles on a specific topic.

I have to say that reading articles in such a minimalist way is refreshing. Arguably, TechCrunch isn’t the worst website out there. But the web has become too cluttered and you end up loading one bloated web page after another. So if you want to go back to text browsers, here’s your chance.