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Reading RSS Feeds in the Terminal

:: newsboat rss atom feeds feedreader

A terminal window on a computer screen

Newsboat is a terminal-based (CLI) program for reading rss and atom feeds (like mine). It is my favourite way to read feeds and keep them updated. The interface is simple, easy to navigate and clean.

I used newsboat originally on OS X 10.4 and 10.5 back when I had an iBook G4, then a Macbook Pro (still waiting on that PowerBook G4). My original feed.xml served as the starting point for my new feed list. Now, I'm running it on Fedora and I have three aliases in my .bash.rc file to make adding and reading feeds convenient.

alias nb='newsboat'

This first alias just runs newsboat.

alias nbedit='nano /home/brendan/.newsboat/urls`

This alias opens the list of urls. The urls also support tags, which you can use to navigate the program. I often use tech for technical feeds, blog for personal blogs, and pub for commercial publications.

alias nbadd='cat >> ~/.newsboat/urls'

This last alias concatenates (adds at the end of the file) the inputted text as a new line. I often open my terminal use nbadd to add a new feed (or feeds) and assign tags without even opening the application.

When I want to read feeds, I just type nb. Newsboat keeps a cache of feeds that you've refreshed and articles (or posts) that you've read or marked as read. I currently have 239 feeds in my list. To check-out some of these feeds see the /blogroll.

Your file full of links is located in ~/.newsboat/urls and you can copy this urls file to another computer and have the same feeds available just by installing the program. You can also export your subscriptions of feeds to an OPML file. You can then import this file to another reader.

newsboat --export-to-opml2 > ~/Documents/rss\ feeds/newsboat_feeds.opml

If you choose OPML2, you can export tags as well. The documentation has lots of options to discover. I would like to restore a retro computer just to have an news reader terminal system. Stay tuned for that as an upcoming project.

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