Newsboat and RSS

Date: 2023-03-04+

I have been using RSS readers for a long time. I don't even remember which one was my first reader, but I liked it, that I can read lots of stuff around the web, whenever I wanted to. I think RSS is a wonderful and simple technology, that's worth not just the preservation, but make it more popular. Today we have push notifications in our browsers, which can be very annoying for most people, since it constantly notifies us when some site is updated.

RSS does the opposite. You have a separate site or software that you have to start, update your feed, and then you can see which site was updated. You can read, mark posts, as you like, and

And RSS is not just for written articles. You can follow people on twitter (via nitter), fediverse, youtube (via invidious), podcasts, etc.

I would say, that with RSS you can have your internet consumption in one place and in a more focused manner, since you wouldn't go outside of your RSS reader much.

Over the years I have used many readers, but lately I am focusing more on using text-based ones, so it was natural to look at something that I can use from the terminal…

Newsboat

Newsboat has a long history, as it is a fork of Newsbeuter. It is probably one of the most used terminal based software out there. I used to use elfeed for Emacs, but I had always trouble updating newly added feeds, and sometimes it was slow.

For some reason I couldn't make Newsboat work on my Slackware 15.0 install. However I checked it again, and I did it! Stupid dependencies. :) (and stupid me, as I probably mixed up something)

Of course if you are using some other distro, newsboat will probably in their repository for easy install.

After installation

After installation you can copy the config example:

$ cp /usr/share/doc/newsboat-2.28/examples/config ~/.config/newsboat/

Obviously if you have a different version of newsboat, you need to modify that number.

Basic feed configuration

It's very easy to add your feed to the ~/.config/newsboat/urls file, or you can import your feeds as well from OPML.

Simple put your feeds, one per line. Newsboat supports tagging, which means that you can add one or more category to a feed, after their url, put the name of the between quotes like this: "linux". If you want more: "linux" "podcast". If for some reason you want to rename the name of the feed, you can after tagging, you put the name in quotes and after the ~ sign: "~New name of the feed".

Example:

https://invidious.snopyta.org/feed/channel/UCkK9UDm_ZNrq_rIXCz3xCGA "linux" "vids" "~Bryan Lunduke's youtube"

To see your tags list in newsboat, just press t, and then select the tag to see all the feeds you tagged.

In default view you will see your feeds in the order you added them in the urls file. You can sort your feeds, by pressing g, and you can see the options.

Basic config

Luckily the copied example configuration is well commented, so everybody can look at, and modify the options. I highly recommend the newsboat documentation, which has everthing about the software. Let's just say you can spend a few hours reading it. I mean just for starters, you can make your own shortcuts, and create macros, etc.

I like it!

Newsboat is fast, cutomizable and works really well for me, in the past few days. Forgot to mention, that you can use it with web-based RSS readers as well, which probably comes in handy for people who are using multiple computers.