Quick guide to set up Newsboat

Part of my customisations concern newsboat, a decent RSS/Atom reader for the console. If you have never heard what an RSS or Atom feed is, it is a data stream that is meant to be read by client programs, known as “readers” or “feed readers”. Whenever the source that publishes the feed makes a new entry (publishes something), the stream is populated with the new content, which the reader can then fetch. This makes it possible to keep track of multiple websites from a single interface. Having all that in the terminal makes things even better.

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF newsboat/
newsboat/
└── .config/
	└── newsboat/
		├── config
		├── queue
		├── themes/
		│   ├── tempus_theme_dark.theme
		│   └── tempus_theme_light.theme
		└── urls -> /path/to/my/symlink # not part of the dotfiles

3 directories, 5 files

All you need to get started is to first put things in place:

~/cpdfd $ stow -v newsboat
LINK: .config/newsboat => ../dotfiles/newsboat/.config/newsboat

Then to actually read some feeds, you must manually create a urls file at ~/.config/newsboat/ with a single feed source per line, like this:

https://www.debian.org/News/news
https://bits.debian.org/feeds/atom.xml
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/news/feed.xml

I personally exclude this file from the dotfiles because it might contain sensitive information.

If you want to filter feeds, you can add one or more tags to them, with a space demarcating each entry:

https://www.debian.org/News/news "Distro"
https://bits.debian.org/feeds/atom.xml "Distro Community"
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/news/feed.xml "GNU Linux Distro"

Tags are used to aggregate content from multiple sources:

# A catch-all filter for unread items
"query:Unread Articles:unread = \"yes\""

# Some tag-specific filters
"query:GNU plus Linux:tags # \"Distro\""
"query:ARBITRARY NAME OF FILTER:tags # \"Tag\""

Once you launch the program, either from the command line or with the key chord chain super + x ; 4 (see chapter on the basics of BSPWM) you will start seeing news items pop up, grouped by source URL. From there you can use Vi motions or the arrow keys to select the desired item and either read it in place by hitting the Return key (Enter) or open it in the browser by hitting o (firefox-esr is the default and what I use).

The config file is fairly simple, with each setting usually describing what it does:

# General
# -------
show-read-articles no
show-read-feeds no
prepopulate-query-feeds no
feed-sort-order unreadarticlecount
show-keymap-hint yes
swap-title-and-hints no
text-width 72
save-path "~/Documents/archived-articles/rss"
browser /usr/bin/xdg-open %u
confirm-exit yes
display-article-progress yes

For more, see the source for the actual configurations. Also read the manual with man newsboat.

Quick guide to set up Newsboat

Prot's Dots For Debian - Book index