Newsboat

Last updated
Newsboat
Original author(s) Alexander Batischev and contributors
Developer(s) Alexander Batischev and contributors
Initial releaseSeptember 20, 2017;6 years ago (2017-09-20) [1]
Stable release
2.32 [2] / 25 June 2023;3 months ago (25 June 2023)
Repository
Written in C++
Operating system Linux, macOS, FreeBSD
Available inCatalan, Chinese, Chinese (Taiwan), Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian [3]
Type News aggregator
License MIT License
Website www.newsboat.org   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Newsboat is a free and open-source RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals for Unix-like operating systems, released under the MIT License. It is an actively maintained fork of Newsbeuter which was abandoned in September 2017. Newsbeuter's original developers advise users to switch to Newsboat, [4] and Newsboat's version numbers continued where Newsbeuter left off. [5] Newsboat supports feed formats RSS and Atom and can import and export subscription lists in the OPML format. It also supports podcasting and synchronization with other news reading services.

Contents

Installation

Newsboat has been tested on Linux (with glibc and musl-libc), FreeBSD and macOS. [6] The program can be installed from binary packages on major Linux and BSD distributions and Homebrew, [7] it is available as a distribution-independent snap package, or it can be compiled from source. [8]

Operation

Newsboat is controlled entirely with the keyboard, [9] and its default keybindings resemble those of vi. The keyboard shortcuts and a lot of other options can be configured with a single text file. [10]

The feeds are placed in another plain textfile. Because Newsboat, like most feedreaders, supports the OPML format it can also import files from other feedreaders. [11] In addition to merely importing feedlist from other readers, Newsboat can act as a client for news reading services like Tiny Tiny RSS, The Old Reader, Inoreader, NewsBlur, the newsreader apps for ownCloud and Nextcloud, and some more. [10] [12]

Podcast support

Newsboat also provides basic podcast support through Podboat, a separate but included application that facilitates downloading and queuing of podcast episodes. It does not actually play the podcasts; for this an external media player is needed. [13] While viewing a podcast feed in Newsboat, a user can press a single key to download the episode to their download queue. All the information will be stored in a queue file in the newsboat directory. Podboat reads this queue and downloads the episode(s) to the user's local drive. [11]

Reception

According to a review on Opensource.com "Newsboat is an excellent RSS reader, whether you need a basic set of features or want your application to do a whole lot more." [10] Luke Baker of website Linuxlinks summarized his preview as "Newsboat is a wonderful, open source RSS reader. It’s lean, compact, super fast, endowed with a good feature set, and a worthy continuation of the Newsbeuter project. The software is extremely configurable and offers a great feature set without any bloat." [14] Linux Magazine in its FOSSPicks praises Newsboats speed: "Everything happens so quickly. With your feeds listed in the main view, pressing R will reload the state of every feed in your list, and this happens quickly even with dozens of feeds." and mentions the benefits of a simple distraction-free text interface. [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GnuCash</span> Personal and small-business financial-accounting software

GnuCash is an accounting program that implements a double-entry bookkeeping system. It was initially aimed at developing capabilities similar to Intuit, Inc.'s Quicken application, but also has features for small business accounting. Recent development has been focused on adapting to modern desktop support-library requirements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RSS</span> Family of web feed formats

RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RSSOwl</span>

RSSOwl is a news aggregator for RSS and Atom News feeds. It is written in Java and built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform which uses SWT as a widget toolkit to allow it to fit in with the look and feel of different operating systems while remaining cross-platform. Released under the EPL-1.0 license, RSSOwl is free software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Liferea</span> News aggregator software

Liferea is a news aggregator for online news feeds and podcasts. It supports the major feed formats including RSS/RDF and Atom and can import and export subscription lists in OPML format. Liferea is intended to be a fast, easy to use, and easy to install news aggregator for GTK+ that can be used with the GNOME desktop. Liferea features a script manager, in which users can add custom scripts that run whenever a certain action occurs.

The following tables compare general and technical features of notable email client programs.

RSS Bandit is an open source RSS/Atom aggregator based on the Microsoft .NET framework. It was originally released as a code sample in a series of articles the Extreme XML column written by Dare Obasanjo on MSDN in 2003. The code samples were developed into an open source project. It is currently hosted on GitHub and the primary contributors are Dare Obasanjo and Torsten Rendelmann.

qBittorrent Free and open source BitTorrent client

qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client written in native C++. It relies on Boost, Qt 6 toolkit and the libtorrent-rasterbar library, with an optional search engine written in Python.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PeaZip</span> File archive computer program

PeaZip is a free and open-source file manager and file archiver for Microsoft Windows, ReactOS, Linux, MacOS and BSD by Giorgio Tani. It supports its native PEA archive format and other mainstream formats, with special focus on handling open formats. Version 8.6.0 supported 226 file extensions.

The following is a comparison of RSS feed aggregators. Often e-mail programs and web browsers have the ability to display RSS feeds. They are listed here, too.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canto (news aggregator)</span> News aggregator

Canto is a terminal based aggregator for online news. It supports all major news formats, as well as importing from and exporting to OPML. The news content is downloadable and as such Canto also has limited podcasting support. Canto intends to be extremely flexible and extensible, allowing the full use of the Python programming language in its configuration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kiwix</span> Open-source offline browser for public domain projects

Kiwix is a free and open-source offline web browser created by Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin in 2007. It was first launched to allow offline access to Wikipedia, but has since expanded to include other projects from the Wikimedia Foundation, public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, many of the Stack Exchange sites, and many other resources. Available in more than 100 languages, Kiwix has been included in several high-profile projects, from smuggling operations in North Korea and encyclopedic access in Cuba to Google Impact Challenge's recipient Bibliothèques Sans Frontières.

ownCloud Free software for cloud computing

ownCloud is an open-source software product for sharing and syncing of files in distributed and federated enterprise scenarios. It allows companies and remote end-users to organize their documents on servers, computers and mobile devices and work with them collaboratively, while keeping a centrally organized and synchronized state. ownCloud supports extensions like online document editing and synchronization of calendars and contacts. Users can access data and documents through a web browser or a variety of client apps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Newsbeuter</span> News aggregator for text terminals

Newsbeuter was a text-based news aggregator for Unix-like systems. It was originally written by Andreas Krennmair in 2007 and released under the MIT License. The program is aimed at power users and strives to be "the mutt of rss feed readers." It supports the major feed formats including RSS and Atom and can import and export subscription lists in the OPML format. Newsbeuter (podbeuter) also supports podcasting and synchronization. As of 2017, the project is no longer maintained; the original developers advise users to switch to Newsboat, an actively maintained fork of Newsbeuter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Void Linux</span> Independent distribution developed entirely by volunteers

Void Linux is an independent Linux distribution that uses the X Binary Package System (XBPS) package manager, which was designed and implemented from scratch, and the runit init system. Excluding binary kernel blobs, a base install is composed entirely of free software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">QuiteRSS</span> Free software RSS reader

QuiteRSS is an open source cross-platform news aggregator for RSS and Atom news feeds. QuiteRSS is free software released under the GPL-3.0-or-later license. It is available for Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Linux, and OS/2. It has two layout modes—classic and newspaper. The classic layout has a three-panel view for the feed list, posts and browser. It supports tabbed browsing, import/export of OPML feeds, basic web browsing functions, adblocking, tags and system tray integration. It uses the WebKit browsing engine for its embedded browser

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lector (software)</span>

Lector is a free e-book reading application for desktop Linux systems that also has basic collection management features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Foliate (software)</span> E-book reading application for Linux

Foliate is a free e-book reading application for desktop Linux systems. The name refers to leaves, meaning "(getting) leafy" or "…-leaved".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNOME Terminator</span> Terminal emulator influenced by GNOME Terminal

GNOME Terminator is a free and open-source terminal emulator for Linux programmed in Python, licensed under GPL-2.0-only. The goal of the project is to produce a useful tool for arranging terminals. It is inspired by programs such as gnome-multi-term, QuadKonsole, etc. In that the main focus is arranging terminals in grids. Terminator packages exist for Arch, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Snap, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. In 2017 took second place in voting at opensource.com, after Gnome Terminal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RSS Guard</span> Free and open-source news aggregator

RSS Guard is a free and open-source news aggregator for web feeds and podcasts. It is written in C++ and uses Qt, which allows it to fit with the look and feel of different operating systems while remaining cross-platform. It includes a file downloader, advanced network proxy configuration, and supports external media viewing tools.

References

  1. ↑ "Newsboat". GitHub .
  2. ↑ "Release 2.32". 25 June 2023. Retrieved 29 June 2023.
  3. ↑ Newsboat GitHub repository
  4. ↑ Krennmair, Andreas (2021-11-14), ABANDONED! An actively maintained fork is available in newsboat repo , retrieved 2021-11-15
  5. ↑ "newsboat/CHANGELOG.md at master - newsboat/newsboat". Newsboat on GitHub. 2017-09-20. Retrieved 2021-11-14. This is what Newsbeuter 2.10 should have been. Newsboat continues Newsbeuter's version numbering to show that we are a spiritual continuation, not a separate project.
  6. ↑ "The Newsboat RSS Feedreader". newsboat.org. Retrieved 2021-11-14.
  7. ↑ "newsboat package versions". Repology. Retrieved 2021-11-15.
  8. ↑ "The Newsboat RSS Feedreader". Newsboat documentation. Retrieved 2021-11-14.
  9. ↑ "How To Use Command Line Newsboat RSS Feed Reader On Linux?". Fossbytes. 2021-06-09. Retrieved 2021-11-15.
  10. 1 2 3 Nesbitt, Scott (2020-02-28). "Revive your RSS feed with Newsboat in the Linux terminal". Opensource.com . Archived from the original on 2021-04-11. Retrieved 2021-11-14.
  11. 1 2 Sonney, Kevin (2020-01-22). "Get your RSS feeds and podcasts in one place with this open source tool". Opensource.com . Archived from the original on 2021-02-25. Retrieved 2021-11-14.
  12. ↑ "The Newsboat RSS Feedreader". Newsboat documentation. Retrieved 2021-11-14.
  13. ↑ "The Newsboat RSS Feedreader". Newsboat documentation. Retrieved 2021-11-14.
  14. ↑ Baker, Luke (2018-07-16). "Newsboat: A Snazzy Text-Based RSS Feed Reader". LinuxLinks. Archived from the original on 2021-02-28. Retrieved 2021-11-14.
  15. ↑ "FOSSPicks - Page: 1.3 » Linux Magazine". Linux Magazine . October 2019. Retrieved 2022-06-09.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.