dank-mode

Emacs major mode for browsing dank memes Reddit.

Features and screenshots

• Load list of posts for your frontpage or a specific subreddit.
• Read comments for a post (nested and filled).
• Open posts and links in a browser or with EWW.
• Customizable faces.

Install

MELPA

Coming soon.

straight.el

You can also install the package with straight.el, just watch out for the issue with conflicting repository names.

Example with straight.el & use-package:

(use-package web-server
  :defer t
  :straight (web-server :host github :repo "eschulte/emacs-web-server" :local-repo "web-server"))

(use-package dank-mode
  :straight (:host github :repo "john2x/dank-mode" :files ("lisp/*.el")))

Manual installation

Download a release from https://github.com/john2x/dank-mode/releases or clone this repo and copy the contents of the lisp/ folder in your Emacs load path.

Minimum Emacs version

This package requires at least Emacs version 27.1.

3rd-party packages

This package requires the following packages (available on GNU ELPA):

• oauth2 (available on GNU ELPA)
• web-server (available on GNU ELPA)
• markdown-mode (available on non-GNU ELPA)

Authentication

All requests to the Reddit API must be authenticated.

When you start dank-mode for the first time, you will be redirected to the Reddit OAuth authorization page in your browser.

When you grant the permissions, you will be redirected to page served on localhost. This server will parse the token in the page and store it with plstore. At this point you will be prompted to enter a passphrase to encrypt the token on disk.

You will occasionally be asked to re-enter the passphrase when the token is refreshed (every 1 hour) or when you restart dank-mode. (If you don't want to be prompted for a passphrase every time the token needs to be refreshed, this can be disabled by setting dank-mode-oauth-encrypt-plstore to nil)

Also watch out if you're using EXWM, because the OAuth execution won't let you press "Accept" in the browser. You'd have to run dank-mode in a nested Emacs session for the first time.

Note about previous authentication method: if you previously authenticated with your own Reddit client id and username/password (e.g. version 0.1.5 and below), you will need to re-authenticate. This can be done by restarting dank-mode or with M-x dank-mode-oauth-start.

Storing your access/refresh tokens unecrypted

The oauth2 package uses plstore to store the OAuth tokens on disk. By default, it treats the access and refresh tokens as secrets (appropriately so). This causes plstore-put to prompt for a passphrase when writing them to disk.

This could get annoying when you have to provide a passphrase every time the access token needs a refresh (every hour or so).

As a workaround, you can set dank-mode-oauth-encrypt-plstore to override this behavior at your risk.

Using your own Reddit API keys

By default, dank-mode will use a Reddit OAuth "installed" app created by me. If you don't want to authorize this app, you can create your own "installed" app via https://old.reddit.com/prefs/apps. Just make sure to use http://localhost:36227/dank-mode/oauth/redirect as the redirect url.

Replace dank-mode-oauth-client-id with your installed app client id.

Usage instructions

Quick tutorial

Frontpage and subreddits

Open your frontpage with M-x dank-mode. If this is your first time running dank-mode, you will be prompted to grant permissions (see Authentication above). You will then be taken to a new buffer with the frontpage posts sorted by hot (the default).

This buffer will have the dank-mode-posts-mode major mode enabled. The "active" post under point will be highlighted. Navigate between posts with n (down) and p (up).

To open the post link in your browser, press C-x l b. Alternatively, to open the post link with EWW, press C-x l l.

To navigate to a specific subreddit, press C-x C-f. You will be prompted to enter the subreddit name. A list of your subscribed subreddits will be available for autocompletion, but specifying a subreddit not in this list will also work.

Alternatively, to navigate to the subreddit under point, press C-x C-/.

To load the next page, press C-x C-v. To refresh, press C-x C-r (this will reset the page count).

To change the posts sorting, press C-x C-s.

Comments

To read the comments of the active post, press C-x C-o. This will create a new buffer in dank-mode-comments mode for the post's comments. Navigating between comments is done similarly with n and p.

To jump between sibling comments, press M-n or M-p. To jump to the parent comment, press P (Shift-p).

To load more comments, navigate to that "load more" comment and press C-x C-o. If it's a small enough comment tree the comments will be inserted into the current buffer. If it's not, the comment tree will be opened in a new buffer.

To fold/unfold a comment tree, press TAB.

To quit the comment buffer and go back to the frontpage or subreddit buffer, press C-x q.

Other commands

To view the full list of commands, refer to the mode help page C-x h m.

Roadmap

• Better auth (e.g. don't require providing password in plaintext)
• Multi-reddits
• Upvote/downvote posts and comments
• Reply in comments
• Submitting posts
• Search

See TODO.org and CHANGELOG.org for more details.

Maybe:

• Saving posts and comments
• Viewing the user's saved/upvoted/replied posts and comments

Out of scope:

These are features I don't use and don't intend to implement anytime soon:

• moderating
• live threads
• polling
• private messages