nos-cli

NOS News on the command-line, written in Rust.


nos-cli demo


nos-cli is a CLI application for viewing NOS articles. It has features like searching, scrolling, and more. I made this application for myself, because I wanted to view Dutch news on the command-line. Besides that, I wanted to learn a new programming language. I first wrote this application in Python, but this was too slow. That's why I chose to rewrite it in Rust.


The first and easiest part was collecting the articles from nos.nl. For this I used webscraping. Because NOS uses a consistent layout, extracting the information is fairly straightforward. The only thing that cannot be fixed is that no photos can be loaded, since it is a CLI application.


After this an interface had to be built. This is also the most important part. I deliberately chose not to use a library, but write the interface myself. This gives me more freedom in implementing new features. The hardest feature to implement was scrolling. I had a hard time figuring out how to handle scrolling, but I got it working eventually.


I am still actively developing this application, because there are some features missing that I want. The biggest one is being able to switch categories without needing to restart the applciation. Unfortunately NOS only provides Dutch articles, but I might add other sites in the future.


View project