i found something i’m absolutely delighted with the other day – it’s called newsbeuter, and it’s a cli ncurses rss reader – “the mutt of rss readers”. documentation, archwiki article, github.

after i left most social media a few years ago, i started assembling a new mode of internet use. i spent a lot of time cruising blogs and finding interesting people and began posting on a forum, for the most part. i had been using feedly as an rss reader – i never had a chance to try google reader, and i kept crashing and burning trying to host rss software like tiny tiny rss on my vps. feedly works reasonably well, but it’s bloated and ugly so i’ve been keeping my eyes open. enter newsbeuter

i’ve come to really enjoy being able to read and compute on a dark screen cramped with terminals. ncurses is a cross-platform library meant to create terminal-based gui’s, and i’ve developed a lot of aesthetic attachement to having newsbeuter, vim, ncmpcpp, and finch filling my peripheral vision with nice mono terminal text and dark color schemes. it beats flashing browsers and memory-intensive gui frameworks imo, at least.

the only real disappointment i’ve had with newsbeuter is that there doesnt seem to be any way to have a single linear timelines one can simply scroll through or paginate – only individual posts, manually reloaded (autoreload is an option but blasting 60 urls every time i want to open it was a bit of a pain), paged through with n.

anyway – i’m so excited about having a terminal based rss reader that i wanted to share, even if i’m just talking into the void of this blog. i hope someone else might find it as exciting as i do. and here is my config dotfile – i think it’s relatively sane to copy/paste.