If you’re a tech junkie, then you surely know about Hacker News. Created by Paul Graham in early 2007, Hacker News (HN for short) is a social news website that focuses goes beyond computer science, technology, and everything-tech-entrepreneurship-related.
Sporting a somewhat stripped-down GUI with next to no bloat and ads, Hacker News is one of the fastest news websites out there. Still, it does require you to open up a web browser in order to access it, unless, you get a desktop reader app.
Hackgregator is one such app, a free and open-source Hacker News reader GTK4 app for Linux that’s written in Rust and uses libadwaita.
Comfortable reader app for news.ycombinator.com
Just like the Hacker News website, Hackgregator is all about simplicity and speed. Hence, there are no fancy features to be found here. You get to choose how the Hacker News feed is displayed. You can choose between Top Stories, Best Stories, New Stories, Ask HN, Show HN, and Jobs.
As mentioned before, this is a reader app which means you can read posts directly within the app’s GUI, but sadly, there are no controls for formatting. You can also view the comments of each post by pressing the associated button on the right side, and that’s about it.
Verdict
Hackgregator may not be the most impressive reader app out there, but it gets the job done. It provides a quick and easy way of viewing Hacker News content from the comforts of the desktop, reading posts, and checking out the comments from each post, and not much else.
The app seems to also have a Preferences section, but we couldn’t access it, for some reason (either the section is currently under development, or we encountered a strange compatibility issue between the app and our system’s desktop environment).
