The terminal is your new Zhihu HQ.
browse · download · search · publish · analyze — all from the command line.
zhihu-cli turns your terminal into a full-featured Zhihu client. Authenticate once, then browse, search, download, publish, and analyze — without ever opening a browser.
⚠️ This is an unofficial CLI for Zhihu. Use at your own risk. Not affiliated with Zhihu Inc.
# Install
pip install -e .
# Optional extras
pip install -e ".[nlp]" # word clouds, clustering
pip install -e ".[creator]" # income charts, trends
pip install -e ".[classifier]" # ML-powered content classificationzhihu auth paste # paste a cURL from browser DevTools
zhihu auth login # scan a QR code with the Zhihu Appzhihu auth status # check login status and active profileBrowse Zhihu's feeds, hot lists, questions, articles, pins, and comments — all rendered in your terminal with a Rich-powered pager. Explore the real-time trending list with excerpts, scroll through your personalized recommend feed, or dive into a question and its full answer thread without clicking a single link.
Save any Zhihu content (articles, answers, questions, pins, videos) as clean Markdown with YAML frontmatter. Download individual pieces or batch-process from a manifest. Everything lands in ~/.zhihu-cli/downloads/, organized by type, ready for your note-taking system or offline reading.
Search questions, articles, users, and topics across Zhihu. Fine-tune result depth and quantity — all from the command line.
Write answers and articles in Markdown, publish them to Zhihu with one command. Need to update? Modify existing answers and articles from your local files. Markdown-to-HTML conversion happens automatically via Zhihu's own rendering pipeline.
Vote, thank, follow, block, and comment — full social interaction without the browser. Manage collections: create, populate, and organize them. Send and receive direct messages, and stream real-time notifications and chat via MQTT.
Batch-export your creations, activity history, answers, and articles as structured JSON. Use the universal converter to merge and normalize across formats for your own data pipeline.
Creator analytics — pull your Zhihu income data and visualize it: monthly summaries, trend charts (with EMA), advanced indicators (Bollinger Bands, MACD), derivative analysis (velocity/acceleration/jerk), weekday breakdowns, and per-content daily metrics. Charts are saved as PNGs.
NLP tools — run word frequency analysis, generate word clouds, and perform K-means clustering on your downloaded content. All operate across your full Markdown library.
Save multiple profiles from different accounts, switch between them with a single command. Each profile keeps its own auth credentials and cookies.
src/zhihu_cli/
├── main.py # Click CLI — command group hub
├── output.py # styled terminal output (Rich)
├── content/
│ ├── handlers/ # one file per Zhihu domain
│ └── utils/ # HTML↔Markdown, ZSE v4 signing
├── creator_tools/ # income analytics + plotting
├── nlp_tools/ # word count, wordcloud, clustering
└── extensions/ # plugin system (auto-discovered)
| Layer | What It Does |
|---|---|
| 🔐 Auth | Browser Cookie + User-Agent headers from cURL paste or QR code login, cached per-profile |
| ✍️ Signing | Every Zhihu request gets auto-signed with x-zse-93 / x-zse-96 headers via ZSE v4 cipher |
| 🌐 Requests | curl_cffi impersonates Chrome's TLS fingerprint to avoid detection |
| 📄 Extraction | Prefers direct API calls; falls back to HTML page scraping with js-initialData parsing |
| 📝 Markdown | HTML → LaTeX preprocessing → recursive traversal → clean Markdown. Reverse for publishing |
| 🔌 Extensions | Drop a plugin in extensions/ with register_cli(group) — auto-discovered at startup |
pip install -e ".[nlp]" # jieba, matplotlib, wordcloud, scikit-learn...
pip install -e ".[creator]" # matplotlib, numpy, pandas, seaborn...
pip install -e ".[classifier]" # torch, transformers, scikit-learn...eval "$(python autocomp.py)"PRs welcome! The codebase is structured for extensibility:
- New command? Add a file to
commands/with aregister_<name>(group)function, import it inmain.py. - New handler? Add a file to
content/handlers/— follow the existing patterns. - New extension? Create
extensions/<name>/with an__init__.pyexposingregister_cli(group).
Run the formatter before submitting:
pre-commit run --all-files
ruff check .
ruff format .MIT
Made with ❤️ and way too many terminal sessions.
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