Newsraft
| File:Newsraft-killing-ants-article-screenshot.png Newsraft 0.19 displaying Drew DeVault's "Killing ants with nuclear weapons" article | |
| Original author(s) | Grigory Kirillov |
|---|---|
| Initial release | June 29, 2022[1] |
| Stable release | 0.19
/ June 8, 2023 |
| Written in | C |
| Engine | |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | English |
| Type | News aggregator |
| License | ISC license |
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Newsraft is a cross-platform free and open-source text-based news aggregator for reading syndication feeds. It is greatly inspired by Newsboat and tries to be its lightweight counterpart. Newsraft supports RSS and Atom feed formats and is released under ISC license.[2]
Functionality
Compared to Newsboat, Newsraft lacks some functionality like a comprehensive filter language and integration with third-party news aggregation services like Feedly, however it uses sections to organize feeds instead and incorporates streaming parsers which are more performant than DOM parsers used by Newsboat. Some notable features are:
- Parallel downloads;
- Automatic updates;
- Respect for
ETag,Last-ModifiedandExpiresHTTP headers by default;
- Flexible configuration of many settings through the config file;
- Small codebase (around 9k lines of C code).
Newsraft is developed with a bias in minimalism and seeks to avoid the state of Newsboat in which it uses multiple programming languages in the codebase and has a relatively large set of dependencies needed to build the project.[3]
Installation
Newsraft is created with POSIX compatibility in mind, therefore it will work on most known Unix-like operating systems. Some Linux and BSD distributions provide binary packages for installing Newsraft from the repositories through system package manager.[4] Also it's possible to build Newsraft from source manually in a few simple steps.[5]
Starter guide
To start using Newsraft, a user has to create a feeds file with the list of links that point to feeds they want to receive news from (one URL per line). Recommended path for the feeds file is ~/.config/newsraft/feeds. More sophisticated syntax for lines in the feeds file is discussed in detail in the project's man page.
Navigation in the interface is carried out by the same keys as in the vi text editor. There are only 4 menus that a user will have to deal with: sections menu, feeds menu, items menu and pager menu.
Sections menu consists of section entries which are needed to organize feeds in groups to be able to process them in bulk. They are kind of directories for feeds. If a user didn't specify any section declarations in the feeds file then this menu will be skipped.
Feeds menu consists of feed entries. Every feed entry contains news downloaded from one specific source which a user has set in the feeds file. To update a single feed, a user has to select it and press r key. If a user wants to update all feeds, Ctrl+r must be pressed. From feeds menu a user can get to the items menu by entering a feed with ↵ Enter key.[6]
Items menu consists of feed item entries (i. e. single pieces of news) which Newsraft obtains when feeds are updated. Every feed item entry has two switchable properties - read state and importance state. Keys to force read state change: d to mark read, D to mark unread, Ctrl+d to mark everything read. Keys to force importance state change: i to mark important, I to mark unimportant. To view an item's content, a user has to go to pager menu by entering the selected item with ↵ Enter key.
Pager menu will display some details about the selected item and render its content if it was provided by the feed. Usually feed item entries have a links section with one link pointing to a related web page and several links that were mentioned in the item's content. A user can copy these links into clipboard with y key and open them in a web browser with o key. To target a key action to a link with a specific index, a user has to prefix a key press with this index. For example, 5+y will copy the fifth link and 1+7+o will open the seventeenth link in the web browser. A user can also setup custom command bindings to execute any commands with these links.[7] Consider this config file:
bind m exec mpv "%l" bind f exec feh "%l"
With this, a user will be able to open any link in mpv and feh directly from the terminal. If a user has youtube-dl installed, then it is possible to watch videos from many online video platforms which provide syndication feed, including YouTube, with a single key press.[8]
For both sections menu and feeds menu there is a special view mode - explore mode. A user can toggle this mode by pressing the e key in either sections menu or feeds menu. Explore mode lists all the feed item entries in the current scope (i. e. explore mode in sections menu will list all the feed item entries in the database, while in feeds menu it will list feed item entries of all feeds in the current feeds menu). This mode may come in handy when a user wants to quickly scroll through all the news without switching between sections menu and feeds menu back and forth.
See also
References
- ↑ Kirillov, Grigory. "First release of Newsraft". Codeberg. Archived from the original on 2023-07-07. Retrieved 2023-07-07.
- ↑ "Newsraft project page". Codeberg. Retrieved 2023-07-07.
- ↑ "Newsraft project goals". Codeberg. Retrieved 2023-07-07.
- ↑ "Spread of Newsraft package in package repositories". Repology. Retrieved 2023-07-07.
- ↑ "Newsraft build instructions". Codeberg. Retrieved 2023-07-07.
- ↑ Sanz, Ricardo. "RSS readers: read feeds with these graphical and command line tools". RS1 Linux Tools. Archived from the original on 2023-07-07. Retrieved 2023-07-07.
- ↑ Harms, Steven G. "Optimal Mastodon Tools". Archived from the original on 2023-07-07. Retrieved 2023-07-07.
- ↑ Poplawski, Oiher. "Resisting social media using RSS". Archived from the original on 2023-07-07. Retrieved 2023-07-07.
This article "Newsraft" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Newsraft. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
