Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal (opens in new tab)

Here's your list - you have to use double newlines:

- 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

I don't think decentralized indexing is a solvable problem. There's too much crap, and too little in the way of useful signal to tell it apart.

What would be really useful, though, would be a way to separate indexing from the actual torrents.

Let me give you an example: say you're a member of a private tracker, and you see some release that looks nice. You click it in your torrent client. It then tries to find the same torrent on a public tracker (e.g. by hash), and downloads from and seeds to both.

If a system like this existed, then you could use private trackers just for the indexing, and then the computers could be left to do the actual work of finding the data.

Also, as a nice side bonus, this would allow for the "long tail" style of seeding that the more old-fashioned protocols have. If you're not seeding a whole torrent, but just a series of single files, nothing prevents you from just opening up e.g. the 'Downloads' folder to the public, and allow them to download if they can provide the hash of the file. This would make it much easier to find seeds, since the limit usually isn't bandwidth but storage.

Do you actually use torrents day to day? I have a strong suspicion that nowadays most people in developed economies who might be interested in TUIs use private trackers, as they're much safer and usually much better curated. However, that means that a) ratios are usually enforced, you have to keep seeding b) DHT and PEX are disabled and explicitly forbidden. Which in turn means the features you are describing are anti-features, especially considering the rise to *rrr-family of tools aggregating centralised private trackers, and relative unpopularity of DHT for discovery. Without curation and entry barriers open systems like DHT are only going to get spammed and/or get the swarm members DMCAed by RIAA and friends.

Edit: slight rewording

The font isn't strictly required – Mabel functions just fine without it, you will just have one or two characters that don't render properly.

I suppose we could make Nerd Fonts opt-in via the config, but I don't think it's that unusual an ask. See: https://starship.rs

The images in the README have been updated.

The custom font adds a number of glyphs which wouldn't otherwise be accessible. Specifically for the folder icon [1] and I'd have thought for the borders as well.

Nerd Font is pretty cool, I'd give it a go - I don't know how terminals gracefully fallback if the glyphs don't exist.

1: https://github.com/smmr-software/mabel/blob/main/desert.png

If memory serves this was one of the things that bit youtube-dl in the ass with github: the documentation described/demonstrated using it to violate copyright.

It looks like there's a few glyphs being used in this application (things like folder icons, etc) that normal fonts aren't going to provide.

It's built on top of this - https://github.com/anacrolix/torrent - so your answers probably there.

Thank you! Unfortunately, we don't yet support v2. The upstream library we use (see: sibling comments) hasn't implemented support.

No one uses v2.

Looks like Jetbrains Mono

I personally use qbittorrent, after ubittorrent got ads way back. I view torrent clients like a good saw/hammer, if it works and you know it well, that's all you need. Sometimes you don't need to put much thought into what software you pick.

For me, Deluge is pretty much perfect. Altough, I don't really use any advanced features.

Deluge for years. Since uTorrent was full of ads and crap (not sure if it still is)

qBittorrent is great: set up qbittorrent-nox on a server somewhere in the world and you can do everything through the WebUI.

rtorrent for a decade or so.

i use it because of drm.

Transmission

Archive.org supports torrents for downloading huge files (i.e., >50gb archives of content) and the like.

You can probably debate endlessly piracy, ethics, "backups of media that have been purchased but have rotted away due to disc rot", etc. But fundamentally torrents are just a mechanism for delivery of large files or large sets of files, and they work extremely well for things in the tens-of-gigabytes range.

Installed ArchLinux from iso downloaded via BitTorrent just this weekend. BT is great for me because I live in Thailand and we don't always have the best mirrors but generally plenty of peers on fast domestic fibre links.

Yeah it makes me a bit sad.. torrents are technically really cool, and the casual anarchist in me likes how they remove the need for expensive infra/bandwidth to serve huge data.

Yet the overwhelming use by far is just to pirate vids.

You can download some Linux distros and other open source software this way, but yeah…it is largely used for piracy.

I’ve used it once in the past to get a distro iso.

Wish more stuff used it.

I occasionally use a torrent to simply move large files to a slow endpoint (essentially a 1:1 connection), so I don't have to keep the session alive for the whole file move. I know there are probably other, better, solutions for that, but it works for me.

Another example is Facepacks for Football Manager, those are in the tens of GBs. Torrents are a great way to share them around.

The old WoW launcher used to use torrents for distributing the base game and for updates. For some reason they removed that.