Using wallabag on Your Desktop with Frigoligo

As part of my general reading and to gather fuel for my email letter¹, I collect and read more than a few articles from around the web. To do that, I use a read-it-later tool called wallabag. But I don’t always want to log into wallabag to read.

On my phone, I read articles using frigoligo. I discovered recently that there’s a desktop version Frigoligo, which I decided to try.

Here’s what I learned about it.

Installing Frigoligo

To do that, check your Linux distribution’s software centre. If you can’t find it there try installing it as a flatpak.

If you’re adventurous, you can also grab and compile the source code.

Getting Set Up

Before you can start using Frigoligo, you’ll need access to an instance of wallabag. That might be one you run yourself or one of the hosted versions of wallabag.

You’ll also need to set up an API client in wallabag so it and Frigoligo can communicate. That’s not as difficult as it sounds. You can find instructions for doing that here.

Reading with Frigoligo

Once you’ve set up Frigoligo, and if you have some articles already saved in wallabag, they display like this:

From there, scroll through the article to read it. Click the << icon to hide the articles list to make your reading feel a bit less claustrophobic.

Once you’ve finished reading an article, you can click either the Archive or Delete buttons in the article’s header bar to either back them up on wallabag or move them to wallabag’s trash bin.

The other buttons in the header bar enable you to view information about the article you’re reading (including the publication it’s from and the URL), add the articles to your favourites, share the article via email, and change the font and its size. More on this in a moment.

You can also save articles by clicking the three vertical dots at the top of the sidebar and then selecting Save link. In the dialog box that displays, copy the URL of the article and then click OK. Here’s an example:

Customizing Frigoligo

There are a few ways in which you can do that. The first and, to me, most important is changing the font. Click the Text (double T) icon in the header bar to display this fly-out at the bottom of the screen:

You can choose from these fonts:

• Lato.
• Montserrat.
• Literata.
• Newsreader.
• Atkinson Hyperlegible.

You can also increase or decrease the size of the fonts and set the alignment of text to left justified or fully justified.

To fiddle with Frigoligo’s other preferences, click the three vertical dots at the top of the sidebar and then select Settings. This screen displays:

You can change the application’s theme and have Frigoligo up to add a tag to an article when you save it.

What Frigoligo Can’t Do

You can’t highlight text or take notes. The latter appears to be part of the application’s roadmap, but it’s not clear when that will become a reality.

Also, you can’t export articles or groups of articles to another format like PDF or EPUB. You can’t print articles from Frigoligo, either.

Closing Thoughts

Of the two desktop wallabag clients I’ve used, I like Frigoligo better than Read It Later. Frigoligo gives me some continuity between my desktop and my phone when reading.

Frigoligo isn’t perfect, but for me (at least, so far) it’s the best wallabag client that I’ve used.

— Scott Nesbitt