Hacker Pulse: Building a Cross-Platform Hacker News Reader in Rust

Dive into TUI development, web scraping, and CI/CD with Ratatui, reqwest, and GitHub Actions

Photo by Compare Fibre on Unsplash

Introduction

I’ve been learning rust for a while now by reading books and doing exercises. However, nothing better to learn about any programming language than to build a project and write a tutorial about it. If you want your code to be usable by others it needs to have an interface. How intuitive and user friendly your interface is dictates what the user experience will be like. Following three types are that come to mind when I think of interfaces (Note this list is not exhaustive.).

Command Line Interface (CLI)

A CLI is a text-based interface where users interact with the program by typing commands[1]. Any programming language should allow you to create one easily. For example in Python you can use argparse to make CLI very easily. Users often interact with these by passing in arguments and running the cli program. Examples include common commands like ls, cp, mv, rm, rmdir or any bash, powershell, zsh etc. command or even nvidia-smi.

Text User Interface (TUI)

A TUI is a text-based interface that provides some visual elements and interactivity within a terminal[1]. A…