A native macOS Cocoa app for reading Hacker News
Developed by Ammad
Made with ❤️ in London, England, UK
Requires macOS Monterey or later and natively supports Apple Silicon Mac computers.
HacKit is a portmanteau of Hacker News and AppKit which means it is a Cocoa app and made exactly for the Mac. It is not a Catalyst app nor is it a port of an iPhone nor an iPad app. It is a Mac first app.
It is a reader for Hacker News, so that means you can read stories, comments and view polls from the website and can also search stories and polls.
The app was developed by a British macOS and iOS developer during the Coronavirus pandemic. He started it in 2020. The first iteration of HacKit was developed for macOS Catalina and went through a number of iterations and then rebuilt completely from scratch for macOS Big Sur.
- Supports Touch Bar with customisations.
- Customisable unified toolbar.
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- Track stories and manage them in folders.
- Mark stories as read (or unread), favourite (or unfavourite) stories and hide (or unhide) stories.
- Folder management.
- Re-order sidebar categories by drag and drop.
- Adjustable font size for stories list and story.
- Supports Dark mode. Choose system appearance (automatic) or set a preferred appearance.
- Search stories and polls from Algolia or the latest feeds from Hacker News.
- Drag a Hacker News story link and drop it on to HacKit app icon to read the story on HacKit.
- Choose which category HacKit opens with.
- Customise story author badge colour.
- Coloured comments indentation.
- Supports multiple windows to focus on reading a story.
- Read any Hacker News story by copying and pasting the link in HacKit by clicking, Open Story from URL... (⇧⌘O) menu option.
- View user profiles.
- and many more.
Designed by the talented Yannick Lung.
| Key | Detail |
|---|---|
| Platform | macOS Monterey or later |
| Framework | AppKit (Cocoa) |
| Language | Swift 5.8.1 |
| App Version | 3.3 |
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| ⌥⌘N | New Main Window |
| ⌘O | Open the story in a separate window |
| ⇧⌘O | Open a story from a URL |
| ⇧⌘N | New Folder |
| ⌥⌘F | Search Stories and Polls |
| ⌥⇧⌘F | Search Stories and Polls in Current Category… |
| ⌘J | Jump to the selected story |
| ⌃⌘S | Hide/Show sidebar |
| ⌘L | Filter stories |
| ⌘R | Refresh stories |
| ⌥⌘R | Refresh story |
| ⌘T | Jump to the top of the stories |
| ⇧⌘T | Jump to the top of the story |
| ⌘0 | Show the Main Window |
You can drag and drop the story URL.
You can also drag and drop the browser URL. Works in Mozilla Firefox too.
HacKit supports Services. You can enable it in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services > Open in HacKit.
Once you ticked it, it will appear anywhere contextually when dealing with text. You highlight the text and go to [App Name] > Services > Open in HacKit. You can also access the Services menu by right-clicking the text.
Here is a GIF showing how it works.
HacKit does not collect personal data.
HacKit uses TelemetryDeck for anonymous analytics to learn about the app usage and the frequency of the features used, operating system version, language preference, device model etc. This helps to understand how the HacKit is used and to make future development decisions.
Data is not passed nor sold to third-parties.
If you have any questions, please get in touch on GitHub by creating an issue.
- Found a bug?
- Having problems?
- Feature requests?
Please create an issue and the developer should get back to you.