Keeping up with current events is tricky.
Between algorithms painting you into a bubble, and ad-tech fighting for your attention, it
can be a real challenge to stay informed.
But there's another way- a technology that's existed for decades and can really help cut
out the distractions.
Let me explain.
Greetings!
And welcome to another exciting episode of Veronica Explains!
I'm Veronica!
And today, I'd like to talk to you about Newsboat, the terminal RSS feed reader which has made
it so easy for me to keep up with what's happening in the world around me.
A feed reader is a piece of software which can scan a website's "news feed", and aggregate
those items in one location.
This can make it easy to get all of your relevant information in a single place.
Websites use various protocols to deliver information to feed readers, and two of the
most common are called RSS, and Atom.
For practical purposes, you'll often just see the whole concept referred to as "RSS",
and that's what I'm doing here.
Make sure to leave a comment if you want to nerd out with me on the history of the various
feed formats.
Anyway, RSS stands for "Regular Style Sheets" (beep)
RSS stands for "Reasonably Simple Statements" (beep)
RSS stands for "Radiating Samples of Status" (beep)
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication", and is a very standardized way to send out
updates about a website.
Website developers have used RSS for years to build integrations, and allow users to
subscribe to website updates in a reasonably friendly way.
Subscribing to RSS feeds gives you quite the curated collection of compositions, queued
comprehensively for contemplative consumption on a common computer close to you.
Of course, graphical RSS readers are readily available- just look through your software
center and you'll see plenty of options.
Some email clients can act as the RSS reader as well, and that's an excellent option for
keeping your email and news in one place.
But, let's face it: the web can, at times, be overwhelming.
Reading news in the terminal can be a helpful way to stay informed without getting bogged
down by bloat, agitated by adtech, or disillusioned by doomscrolling.
Plus, I'm a terminal nerd, and if you're a terminal nerd too, there's no reason to hop
out of the terminal to catch up on your feeds.
OK, so what is Newsboat, anyway?
Newsboat is a fantastic terminal-based RSS feed reader.
It's an actively maintained fork of an earlier project, Newsbeuter (mispronouncing it).
(Stammering through pronounciation)
"Let me try to help you, I believe it's probably pronounced 'Newsbeuter', that's how you would
do it in German."
Thank you, Christian from The Digital Life!
Anyway, Newsboat is open source, using the MIT license.
Basically, Newsboat is to RSS what Mutt is to email: a simple, yet powerful terminal
application, which is easy to configure.
Now, I know what you might be thinking:
"But Veronica, aren't terminal applications really hard to configure?"
If you're used to a point-and-click mouse interface, yes.
Working in the terminal might seem complicated.
But one advantage to working in the terminal is that the configuration is often nothing
more than a text file, easily portable and sharable from one user to the next.
It's also super easy to back up your configuration - in this case, it's just one directory with
a few text files - so that restoring to a new computer is trivial.
Anyway, beyond Newsboat's terminal cred, it also has a fabulous HTML renderer, translating
occasionally-overwhelming web page designs into simple text, which is great if you're
trying to stay informed without becoming distracted.
Another bonus with Newsboat is the wonderful Macro support.
You can execute sequences on your feeds with a couple of keystrokes- perfect for loading
up audio or video content.
Let me know if you want me to cover Newsboat macros in the sequel to this video!
(gasp)
In the meantime, let's get started!
For today's demonstration, I'm installing and configuring Newsboat on a Manjaro i3 virtual
machine.
I think this might be Manjaro's first appearance on the channel, but let me know if you want
me to cover this awesome distro in greater depth.
I've also tested these instructions on two other machines in my arsenal, running Pop!_OS
22.04, as well as Fedora 36.
But, as always, your mileage may vary.
Don't be afraid to check your distro's documentation for additional info.
It also looks like Newsboat is in the repos for a ton of other distros, and some non-Linuxes
such as FreeBSD and "brew" on the Mac.
And I can see it's in the snap store, but I haven't tested any of that.
I didn't see Newsboat packaged up on Flathub yet, so if you're using a Flatpak-based distro,
such as Silverblue or SteamOS, you might have some challenges following along without running
Newsboat in some sort of container.
Anyway, let's head to the terminal, and then using the package manager for your distro,
simply install.
Here in Manjaro, it's `sudo pacman -S newsboat`.
(sped up music sounds)
In Fedora, it's `sudo dnf install newsboat`.
And, in Pop!_OS, and presumably the other distros in the apt family, it's `sudo apt
install newsboat`.
Once installed, if you try to fire up newsboat, it won't do anything.
That's because it's not yet configured.
Now, you can import an OPML file if you're already using a reader, but in this tutorial,
we're assuming that you're not.
Configuring Newsboat from scratch involves editing text files, which you can do from
any editor you like.
I prefer vim (gasp) but you can use any editor you love, or even one you just tolerate.
(Windows "tada" sound)
I'm going to use nano for today, which is a fine editor.
If you list out all of the contents of the home directory, I can see that newsboat has
created a blank configuration folder at dot-newsboat.
If you don't see that folder, you can create one with mkdir dot-newsboat.
Of course, I don't need this, since newsboat has created its folder already, so I'll just
delete that.
Next, you'll need to add an RSS feed's URL into a file at dot-newsboat-slash-urls, and
in our case, we'll use the nano editor.
Now, this file is the bare minimum to make Newsboat a functional feed reader- it needs
to read at least one feed.
I happen to have an RSS feed for my website, VKC-dot-sh.
That also happens to be the store where you can buy this nerdy tee shirt!
I've got a link to the feed at the bottom of the page.
You can just right click that link, copy the address, and then paste it into the URLs file.
Because we're using nano, we can press Ctrl-X to exit, save the file with a "Y", and then
press "enter" to select the current filename.
Now, if we start Newsboat in the terminal, we can see my feed is listed!
The first thing we'll need to do is press R to reload the contents - this causes Newsboat
to go "fetch" the new contents of the RSS feed.
Shift-R, or "capital R", reloads everything in your feed.
Of course, right now, the feed is pretty bare, so we'll have to add some more content in
a minute.
Pressing "enter" will open the first feed on the list- in this case, the only feed on
the list.
From here, you can select an article- my blog is easy because I only have two posts.
Maybe I should blog more?
Once you've read the first post in the feed, pressing "n" will automatically skip to the
next unread post in your feed.
Fantastic!
Anyway, let's add another feed.
I'm from Minneapolis, and I love the quirky style of Racket, my hometown alt-esque publication.
Now, navigating around their website, I don't see a simple link to the RSS feed.
But, taking a guess, I'm going to just append "feed" to the URL here.
This works for a lot of WordPress sites, which is a good chunk of the blogs out there.
I can tell it did "something", because it downloaded a file here.
Opening up the file shows the inside bits of the RSS feed file, confirming that it did,
in fact work.
(scat singing)
So lets add that to our URLs file, by opening it up in nano again, and typing in that subdirectory
of the Racket site.
Again, I'll exit and save with Ctrl-X to exit, Y to save, and then "enter" to overwrite the
file.
Now, when I launch newsboat again, I can see the feed is there, but it hasn't downloaded
any content.
Hitting shift-R reloads all of my feeds, and I can see it's all there!
Now, I can get caught up on my local snarky news without ever leaving the terminal.
Nobody has to know I'm not editing some complex code file.
Super neat!
Of course, if you want to load up the article in the browser, in order to see the photos
and the whole modern web experience, that's easy.
Just press "o" and the article opens in the browser.
I should note that while it does this, the feed reader locks up waiting for you to finish
reading.
Exit out of the browser window in order to return to the reader.
Now finding feeds by trial and error is a lowsy experience.
But, you have options.
Both Firefox and the all-too-many-Chromium-clones have plugins to allow you to automatically
find an RSS feed for each page.
It does this by scanning the page for certain links, and then showing an icon when the option
was found, thus replicating functionality we used to have before social media ruined
our browser priorities list.
On Firefox, I really like the addon "Awesome RSS".
It seems to work pretty well in my experience.
But, it's not the only option- look around in your browser of choice to see what's available.
After the plugin's installed, many RSS feeds will be automatically detected by the plugin,
and this RSS icon will pop up in the URL bar.
Clicking on it will either load the RSS file directly, or give you multiple feeds to choose
from.
I typically just copy the URL right from here with a right click.
If it loads up a bunch of XML stuff, you can typically just copy the URL right from the
URL bar.
Paste these URLs into your newsboat URLs file, and before you know it, you'll have a great
custom feed of news, with minimal distractions and no algorithms!
And speaking of algorithms...
Let me tell you a secret.
Come closer.
A little closer.
Don't tell Google, but you can even subscribe to YouTube channels using a feed reader.
Here, for instance, I've got Techno Tim's YouTube up.
Great stuff!
I want to add his videos to my feed.
YouTube's feed URL is... complicated, but it is there.
The Awesome RSS addon doesn't seem to struggle with it, although I've found that I occasionally
have to refresh the page to get it to load.
Clicking on this loads the feed directly, which is a bunch of XML that I don't want
to contend with.
No worries, just copy the URL from the URL bar right into the feed reader's URL page.
Also, here's a tip!
From within newsboat, you can open up the URL list with shift-E, or capital E. Very
cool!
Anyway, I just paste in that URL, and away we go.
Of course, there's another way to go find that YouTube RSS url- looking through the
source code.
This feels weird, but you can do it.
Just hit "view source", and then do a Ctrl-F search for "slash RSS".
That'll get you right to the feed.
I wish YouTube put the RSS reader up front, but I suppose they really, really, really
want to get you hooked on their algorithm.
Am I allowed to say that?
I could keep going, but I'm worried this video is getting a little long, so I'm going to
do a part 2, where I cover customizing the interface, making consolidated feeds, categorizing
your feeds, and showing distraction-friendly alternatives to opening links in YouTube or
the web.
There's even a way to get your YouTube videos without all the advertis-
(beep)
Do you already use a feed reader?
Make sure to let me know which feed reader you're using in the comments below.
One of the things I love about Linux is how we get to have fantastic, privacy respecting,
distraction limiting technology, built by a community that cares about making quality
tools like Newsboat.
But I don't know why that would be surprising, because Linux is awesome!
And so are you!
(Child singing) "1, 2, 3, 4!"
(Punk music)