Newsboat FAQ

Table of Contents

1. I get errors like "‘color01’ is not a valid color"
2. I want to have a feed that contains all unread articles of all feeds
3. After I open a link in the browser, Newsboat stays unresponsive until the browser is closed

1. I get errors like "‘color01’ is not a valid color"

Numbers that start with zero are treated as octal; starting with Newsboat 2.10, these are not allowed since they only add confusion.

Convert octal numbers to decimal, and drop the leading zero. For example, color01 should be replaced with color1, color016 with color14 etc.

2. I want to have a feed that contains all unread articles of all feeds

This is supported since Newsbeuter 0.7. All you need to do is add the following line to your ~/.newsboat/urls file:

"query:Unread Articles:unread = \"yes\""

For details, refer to the documentation on query feeds.

3. After I open a link in the browser, Newsboat stays unresponsive until the browser is closed

Newsboat has to behave like that in order to accomodate users of text-based browsers like lynx and w3c. It has to relinquish the terminal and stay out of the way, otherwise people won’t be able to see their browsers.

If you’re using a GUI browser like Firefox, you can do one of two things:

Start your browser beforehand. This way, Newsboat will only wait a fraction of a second (while a new tab is being opened).
Wrap your browser in a script and use the script as Newsboat’s browser.
Put this in ~/bin/newsboat-browser.sh:
```
#/bin/sh
/usr/bin/firefox "$@" &
```
Make it executable:
```
$ chmod +x ~/bin/newsboat-browser.sh
```
Then add the following line to your Newsboat’s config:
```
browser "~/bin/newsboat-browser.sh"
```