Newsboat

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Newsboat is an RSS/Atom feed reader for the text console. It is an actively maintained fork of Newsbeuter.

Installation

USE flags

USE flags for net-news/newsboat An RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals

debug

Enable extra debug codepaths, like asserts and extra output. If you want to get meaningful backtraces see https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Quality_Assurance/Backtraces

Data provided by the Gentoo Package Database · Last update: 2024-04-05 17:22 More information about USE flags

Emerge

root #emerge --ask net-news/newsboat

Configuration

Feeds management

Add feed URLs to the ~/.newsboat/urls file with any text editor one per line. This example uses the gentoo.org news feed XML:

FILE ~/.newsboat/urlsurls

https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml

Formatting / Naming links

To have names appear instead of the long URL configure the links like this:

FILE ~/.newsboat/urlsurls

_your_link_here_ "~_better_name_for_url_here_"

This statement will show _better_name_for_url_here_ instead of the URL link address in newsboat.

Tags

It is possible to have various feeds under the same "tag". These can later be filtered by pressing the t key inside Newsboat. This example will add the gentoo home page to the gentoo tag and the linux kernel homepage to the kernel tag:

FILE ~/.newsboat/urlsurls

https://www.gentoo.org/feeds/news.xml gentoo
https://www.kernel.org/feeds/all.atom.xml kernel

Usage

Invocation

user $newsboat --help

Newsboat 2.23
usage: newsboat [-i <file>|-e] [-u <urlfile>] [-c <cachefile>] [-x <command> ...] [-h]
    -e, --export-to-opml            export OPML feed to stdout
    -r, --refresh-on-start          refresh feeds on start
    -i, --import-from-opml=<file>   import OPML file
    -u, --url-file=<urlfile>        read RSS feed URLs from <urlfile>
    -c, --cache-file=<cachefile>    use <cachefile> as cache file
    -C, --config-file=<configfile>  read configuration from <configfile>
    -X, --vacuum                    compact the cache
    -x, --execute=<command>...      execute list of commands
    -q, --quiet                     quiet startup
    -v, --version                   get version information
    -l, --log-level=<loglevel>      write a log with a certain loglevel (valid values: 1 to 6)
    -d, --log-file=<logfile>        use <logfile> as output log file
    -E, --export-to-file=<file>     export list of read articles to <file>
    -I, --import-from-file=<file>   import list of read articles from <file>
    -h, --help                      this help
        --cleanup                   remove unreferenced items from cache

Tips

Displaying rss feeds as a timeline

It is possible to use Newsboat's queries to replicate a timeline-like view of rss feeds. This could be used to replicate YouTube's Subscription feed. This example uses two YouTube channel rss feeds and planet gentoo's.

FILE ~/.newsboat/urlsurls

"query:Subscriptions:tags # \"timeline\""
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<SomeYTChannel> timeline
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<SomeOtherYTChannel> timeline
https://planet.gentoo.org/rss20.xml timeline

This will create a feed named "Subscriptions" that will display all the entries from feeds belonging to the timeline tag (in this example 2 YouTube channels and the planet gentoo entries).