The Best RSS Reader: Newsboat

My favorite RSS reader is Newsboat. Get it and use it.

Long Live RSS

I don't want a news feed, an endless scroll of suggestions or an email newsletter. Or ads and the marketing tech that goes with it.

What I'd rather: Track what content I'm interested in online, decide I want to see it sometime, ask what's new, quickly scan what's been updated, access it quickly, mark it all read and start over next time.

RSS is great for this.

My current favorite RSS reader is called Newsboat. It's for the terminally-inclined.

Install

sudo apt install newsboat lynx

Setup Interesting Content

If you want to see content in the future, paste the news feed in ~/.newsboat/urls:

https://jaketrent.com/post/feed.xml tech
https://news.ycombinator.com/ news

Launch it

In terminal:

newsboat

It launches a terminal UI (tui).

Basic shortcuts are at the bottom of the ui. Vim shortcuts are pretty good. Enter to read. q to back out.

Bag it, Tag it

Tags can help you categorize content. Set tags with space-delimited words after the url in ~/.newsboat/urls.

To filter by tags when viewing your list of links, press t and select the tag name. Press C-t to clear the filter.

Config Launchers

When you want to see web content, press o. To determine what browser is launched, edit ~/.newsboat/config, here seen using the lynx browser:

browser "lynx %u"