from Hacker News

Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal

by figbert on 6/19/22, 5:47 PM with 54 comments

  • by rakoo on 6/19/22, 10:47 PM

    At this point torrent clients don't provide much if they don't have a really differentiating set of features:

    - torrents work if they are shared more than they are leeched, so it's just easier to have it run in the background. There's very little reason to not use the existing client/server models like transmission or tTorrent - indexing and search still relies too much on third parties. Integrate magnetico (passive indexing), bep 33 (dht-based scraping) and bep 51 (dht-based indexing) and the user gains an order of magnitude of autonomy because they don't rely on centralized authorities anymore - is there a possibility yo go further ? Make sharing files easier with bittorrent, or something like that ? Bittorrent clients should help with that

    Innovation in this sector doesn't mean nicer fonts, there are real avenues for meaningful change that actually improve users' life

  • by crtasm on 6/19/22, 9:18 PM

    Looks interesting, why does it require a special font?

    Suggest you remove the examples of downloading copyrighted content and the yify website from your readme.

  • by KennyBlanken on 6/19/22, 9:24 PM

    I wish more HN posts about software releases were like OP, providing not just a who, but a what.

    OP: does this support version 2 of the spec?

  • by memorable on 6/20/22, 2:12 AM

    What is the font used in one of the screenshots ( https://github.com/smmr-software/mabel/blob/main/desert.png )? Looks rock solid!

  • by iqkznnft on 6/20/22, 1:24 AM

    I hope this is a good place to ask: what do people in HN use for torrent client?

    I recently learned that transmission got hacked (more than once apparently) so I decided to stop using it. The alternatives seem to be deluge or qbittorrent. I picked the latter because it has labels (and supports moving finished downloads to different folders depending on label), which is a feature I'd always wanted in a torrent client. But my point is it seems to me all the torrent clients seems very similar, barring very minor features.

    Anyway, what do you people use and why?

  • by woleium on 6/20/22, 1:30 AM

    How does this improve on rTorrent, or more recent forks like pyroscope: https://github.com/pyroscope/rtorrent-ps

  • by ngcc_hk on 6/20/22, 5:41 AM

    Is there any state of union like link for torrent and other related protocols as mentioned? A bit outdated. And torrent site is not very reliable to get info.

  • by nr2x on 6/19/22, 9:38 PM

    How many people are using torrents for non-piracy reasons?