Techminal

Latest tech news at the top of every terminal session. Clean, readable, easy setup.

Example output

▀█▀ █▀▀ █▀▀ █░█ █▀▄▀█ █ █▄░█ ▄▀█ █░░
░█░ ██▄ █▄▄ █▀█ █░▀░█ █ █░▀█ █▀█ █▄▄

    Apple releases security fix for older iPhones and iPads

    The security update protects a raft of older iPhones and iPads from
    attacks linked to leaked hacking tools called DarkSword.

    Source : TechCrunch, link

The source link is clickable in terminals that support OSC 8 hyperlinks (VSCode, GNOME Terminal, iTerm2, Windows Terminal).

Installation

git clone <repo> ~/techminal
cd ~/techminal
pip install -r requirements.txt

Or without git:

mkdir ~/techminal
# copy techminal.py, techminal.txt and requirements.txt into it
pip install feedparser

Run manually

python3 ~/techminal/techminal.py

Hook into shell startup

Add one line to your shell config so it runs every time you open a terminal.

~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

python3 ~/techminal/techminal.py

Then reload:

source ~/.bashrc   # or source ~/.zshrc

How caching works

On first run, or after one hour, Techminal fetches fresh articles from all RSS feeds and writes them to /tmp/techminal_cache.json. On subsequent runs within the same hour it reads from the cache, making startup nearly instant.

Already-shown article IDs are stored in the cache so the same article is not repeated until all articles have been cycled through. The cache file lives in /tmp/ and is cleared on reboot.

Only articles that include a summary are stored and displayed. Articles with no summary are skipped at fetch time.

Customize sources

Edit the FEEDS list near the top of techminal.py:

FEEDS = [
    ("TechCrunch", "https://techcrunch.com/feed/"),
    ("The Verge",  "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml"),
    ("Hacker News", "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"),
    ("Ars Technica", "https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index"),
]

Any RSS feed that feedparser can parse will work.

Customize / Delete the logo

The ASCII art logo is loaded from techminal.txt. Edit that file to replace it with any ASCII art. The color gradient is applied automatically by the script based on character position.

Requirements

• Python 3.7+
• feedparser (only third-party dependency)
• Internet access for the initial fetch, with a graceful fallback message when offline