Snöigt

Teletext viewer · free and open source

texttv

SVT Text-TV, Swedish public-service teletext, in your terminal.

brew install dfallman/tap/texttv

View on GitHub macOS, Linux, and Windows

About

A small and fast, yet decidedly over-engineered viewer for SVT Text-TV. The interface might feel like 1979 calling, but teletext is still an excellent source of bite-sized news.

Browse pages interactively, or print a single page straight into the terminal. It works in most terminal emulators, from iTerm2 and Ghostty to Windows Terminal and Alacritty.

Pipe it and the colours go away on their own. Headlines are drawn at normal height in text mode, because terminals disagree about double-height lines, and I’d rather it look right everywhere than clever on a third of them.

What it does

  • Interactive browser

    Type a page number, step through pages with the arrow keys, and follow links with Enter.

  • Single pages

    texttv 300 prints the sport index and exits, for a quick look or a script.

  • The right look, automatically

    Picks teletext or image mode to suit your terminal. Override it with --mode or a config file.

  • Mosaics intact

    The SVT logo, sport icons, and weather symbols survive, drawn with Unicode block characters.

  • Pipes cleanly

    texttv 100 | grep gets plain text. By default, colour and image escapes go away when the output isn’t a terminal.

  • Subpages and links

    Multi-page pages get a subpage selector, and three-digit page references on screen become links.

Who it’s for

  • You still check page 100

    You grew up with teletext, and you still turn to page 100 for the news and 300 for the sport. Now you don’t need a TV for it.

  • You live in the terminal

    You’d rather not open a browser full of ads and autoplaying video just to check the headlines. Keep the news, the sport, and the weather in a spare pane instead.

  • You like to script things

    texttv 300 --no-color --no-padding prints the page as plain text, ready to pipe into a status bar, a notification, or whatever else you like.

Teletext mode draws the page as real text you can select and copy.
Image mode shows SVT’s own page, pixel for pixel, in Kitty, Ghostty, WezTerm, and iTerm2.

Install

With Homebrew, on macOS or Linux:

brew install dfallman/tap/texttv

Prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows are on the latest release page, and the source is on GitHub.

Try it

texttvtexttv 100

The first opens the browser: type a page number, use the arrow keys, Esc to quit. The second prints page 100.

texttv is free and open source under the MIT licence. Read the source, report an issue, or contribute on GitHub.