1. Introduction
Newsboat is an RSS/Atom feedreader. RSS and Atom are a number of widely-used XML formats to transmit, publish and syndicate articles, for example news or blog articles. Newsboat is designed to be used on text terminals on Unix or Unix-like systems such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD or macOS.
1.1. Platforms
Newsboat has been tested on Linux (with glibc and musl-libc), FreeBSD and macOS.
NetBSD is currently not supported, due to technical limitations in the iconv()
implementation.
1.2. Why "Newsboat"?
"Newsboat" is a play on the name of its ancestor, "Newsbeuter". They’re spelled quite differently, but sound similar. ("Newsbeuter" is a pun on German word "wildbeuter"; "newsboat" is an English word.)
Newsboats were the vessels that collected and delivered news shuffling between boats in the port. Newsboat the program will collect the news for you, just like its namesakes did back in the day.
2. Installation
2.1. Pre-built binaries
Newsboat binaries are available in a number of repositories:
-
various Linux and BSD distributions, Homebrew etc.; here’s a non-exclusive list;
-
distribution-independent Snap store:
$ sudo snap install newsboat
2.2. From source
2.2.1. Download the source code
The most up-to-date source code can always be downloaded from the Git repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat.git
There are also signed release tarballs available from our website.
2.2.2. Install dependencies
Newsboat depends on a number of libraries, which need to be installed before
Newsboat can be compiled. Make sure to install the header files as well (on
Debian and derivatives, headers are in -dev
packages, e.g. libsqlite3-dev
.)
-
GNU Make 4.0 or newer
-
GCC 5.0 or newer, or Clang 3.6 or newer
-
Stable Rust and Cargo (Rust’s package manager) (1.62.0 or newer; might work with older versions, but we don’t check that)
-
STFL (version 0.21 or newer) (the link points to our own fork because the upstream is dead)
-
Header files for the SSL library that libcurl uses. You can find out which library that is from the output of
curl --version
; most often that’s OpenSSL, sometimes GnuTLS, or maybe something else. -
GNU gettext (on systems that don’t provide gettext in the libc): ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/
-
Asciidoctor (1.5.3 or newer)
Developers will also need:
-
xtr
(version 0.1.4 or newer) (can be installed withcargo install xtr
) -
Coco/R for C++, needed to re-generate filter language parser using
regenerate-parser
target.
2.2.3. Compile and install
There are a few different ways:
-
build inside Docker. For that, check out doc/docker.md in the source tree. Note that the resulting binary might not run outside of that same Docker container if your system doesn’t have all the necessary libraries, or if their versions are too old;
-
build in a chroot: to avoid polluting your system with developer packages, or to avoid upgrading, you might use a tool like
debootstrap
to create an isolated environment. Once that’s done, just build from source as outlined in the next item; -
build from source:
$ make # pass -jN to use N CPU cores, e.g. -j8 $ sudo make install # install everything under /usr/local
To install to a different directory, pass
prefix
like so:sudo make prefix=/opt/newsboat install
. If you’re cross-compiling, setCARGO_BUILD_TARGET
; see cargo documentation for details.To uninstall, run
sudo make uninstall
.
3. First Steps
After you’ve installed Newsboat, you can run it for the first time by typing
newsboat
on your command prompt. This will bring you the following message:
Error: no URLs configured. Please fill the file /home/ak/.newsboat/urls with RSS feed URLs or import an OPML file. Newsboat 2.22 usage: ./newsboat [-i <file>|-e] [-u <urlfile>] [-c <cachefile>] [-x <command> ...] [-h] -e, --export-to-opml export OPML feed to stdout -r, --refresh-on-start refresh feeds on start -i, --import-from-opml=<file> import OPML file -u, --url-file=<urlfile> read RSS feed URLs from <urlfile> -c, --cache-file=<cachefile> use <cachefile> as cache file -C, --config-file=<configfile> read configuration from <configfile> -X, --vacuum compact the cache -x, --execute=<command>... execute list of commands -q, --quiet quiet startup -v, --version get version information -l, --log-level=<loglevel> write a log with a certain loglevel (valid values: 1 to 6) -d, --log-file=<logfile> use <logfile> as output log file -E, --export-to-file=<file> export list of read articles to <file> -I, --import-from-file=<file> import list of read articles from <file> -h, --help this help --cleanup remove unreferenced items from cache
This means that Newsboat can’t start without any configured feeds.
3.1. Adding Feeds
To add feeds to Newsboat, you can simply add one feed URL per line to the ~/.newsboat/urls configuration file:
http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml
You can also import an OPML file by running newsboat -i blogroll.opml
Feeds with restricted access
If you need to add URLs that have restricted access, simply provide username/password:
https://username:password@hostname.domain.tld/feed.rss
In case there is a @ in the username, you need to write it as %40.
In order to protect usernames and passwords, make sure to restrict read access for ~/.newsboat/urls to you and optionally your group:
$ chmod u=rw,g=r,o= ~/.newsboat/urls
Newsboat makes sure to not display usernames and passwords in its user interface.
Local files as feeds
You can also configure local files as feeds, by prefixing the local path with
file://
and adding it to the urls file:
file:///var/log/rss_eventlog.xml
3.2. First UI Interaction
The main UI of Newsboat consists of three views
Feed List View → Article List View → Article View
You can drill down those views by pressing Enter and move to the previous one by pressing Q. Pressing Q on the Feed List View — or pressing Shift+Q from anywhere — closes Newsboat.
You can also search articles' title or content by pressing / on the Feed List View or the Article List View. On the Feed List View all articles of all feeds are taken into account. On the Article List View the articles of the current feed are taken into account. When opening an article from a search result dialog, the search phrase is highlighted.
Feed List View
When you start Newsboat, it presents you with a list of feeds that you added previously.
You can now:
-
Press Shift+R to download articles for all feeds.
-
Press R to download articles for the selected feed.
-
Press / to search all articles in all feeds.
-
Press Enter to go to the article list of a selected feed.
-
Press Q to close Newsboat.
Article List View
After you entered a feed, you can see the list of available articles
by their title.
A N
on the left indicates that an article wasn’t read yet.
You can now:
-
Press Q to go back to the Feed List View.
-
Press / to search all articles of this feed.
-
Press Enter to read a selected article.
Article View
On an article you can scroll through the text and read it. Each link in the article has a number next to it.
You can now:
-
Press any number to open an article link in the browser. For numbers larger than 9 type #, then the number and press Enter.
-
Press O to open the article in the browser.
-
Press Q to go back to the Article List View.
4. Configuration
Several aspects of Newsboat can be configured via a config file, which is stored next to the urls file. A configuration line looks like this in general:
<config-command> <arg1> ...
The configuration file can contain comments, which start with the #
character and go as
far as the end of line.
4.1. Example
An example configuration looks like this
# a comment max-items 100 # such comments are possible, too browser links show-read-feeds no unbind-key R bind-key ^R reload-all
4.2. Splitting long lines into multiple ones
Configuration items, such as macros defined in config files which are long can be split
up into multiple ones using backslashes; these must be the last character on the line and will
immediately concatenate it with the following line. It’s important that nothing
follows the \
on the same line, otherwise the \
character is treated "as is".
Dummy example:
macro p open; \ reload; quit; \ quit; \ quit -- "Opens, reloads then makes sure to quit newsboat"
4.3. Using Double Quotes
Many of Newsboat’s options expect strings as arguments, be it commands, passwords, dialog titles, URLs etc. Some options even take multiple strings at once. These strings can contain spaces, which might confuse Newsboat since it already uses spaces to separate option names from option arguments.
To help Newsboat understand your intent, put such strings into double quotes:
browser "firefox --new-tab %u"
What if you need a double quote inside a string? Escape it with a backslash:
ocnews-password "UnbalancedQuotes\"AreSoFun!"
And what about the backslash itself? Escape it, too! Suppose you have a program
called my favourite pager
, and you want to view articles with it. Newsboat
ultimately passes commands to the shell, and shell expects spaces to be escaped
if you want them preserved. But since Newsboat interprets backslashes, you have
to add another layer of escaping. Thus, you end up with a command like this:
pager "/usr/bin/my\\ favourite\\ pager"
4.4. Shell Evaluation
It is also possible to integrate the output of external commands
into the configuration. The text between two `
backticks is evaluated
as shell command, and its output is used. This works like backtick evaluation in
Bourne-compatible shells and allows users to use external information from the
system within the configuration.
4.5. Escaping
Backticks and #
characters can be escaped with a backslash
(e.g. \`
and \#
).
In this case, they are replaced with literal `
or #
in the
configuration.
4.6. Key Bindings
You can bind a key to an operation with the bind-key
configuration command.
You can specify an optional dialog. This is the context in which the key binding is active.
The syntax for a key binding looks like this:
bind-key <key> <operation> [<dialog>]
Key
Lowercase keys, uppercase keys and special characters are written literally.
Key combinations with Ctrl are written using the caret ^
.
For instance Ctrl+R equals to ^R
.
Please be aware that all Ctrl-related key combinations need to be written in uppercase.
The following identifiers for special keys are supported:
-
ENTER
(Enter key) -
BACKSPACE
(backspace key) -
LEFT
(left cursor) -
RIGHT
(right cursor) -
UP
(up cursor) -
DOWN
(down cursor) -
PPAGE
(page up cursor) -
NPAGE
(page down cursor) -
HOME
(cursor to beginning of list/article) -
END
(cursor to end of list/article) -
ESC
(Esc key) -
TAB
(Tab key) -
F1
toF12
(F1 key to F12 key)
Operation
An operation gets executed when pressing the corresponding key. For a complete list of available operations see Newsboat Operations and Podboat Operations.
Dialog
A dialog is a context in which the key binding is active. Available dialogs are:
-
all
(default if not specified) -
feedlist
-
filebrowser
-
help
-
articlelist
-
article
-
tagselection
-
filterselection
-
urlview
-
podboat
-
dirbrowser
-
searchresultslist
4.7. Colors
It is possible to configure custom color settings in Newsboat. The basic configuration syntax is:
color <element> <foreground color> <background color> [<attribute> ...]
This means that if you configure colors for a certain element, you need to provide a foreground color and a background color as a minimum. The following colors are supported:
-
black
-
red
-
green
-
yellow
-
blue
-
magenta
-
cyan
-
white
-
default
-
color<n>
, e.g.color123
The default
color means that the terminal’s default color will be used. The
color<n>
color name (where <n>
is a decimal number not starting with zero)
can be used if your terminal supports 256 colors (e.g. gnome-terminal
, or xterm
with TERM
set to xterm-256color
). Newsboat contains support for 256 color
terminals since version 2.1. For a complete chart of colors and their
corresponding numbers, please see
https://www.calmar.ws/vim/256-xterm-24bit-rgb-color-chart.html.
Optionally, you can also add one or more attributes. The following attributes are supported:
-
standout
-
underline
-
reverse
-
blink
-
dim
-
bold
-
protect
-
invis
Currently, the following elements are supported:
-
background
: the application background -
listnormal
: a normal list item -
listfocus
: the currently selected list item -
listnormal_unread
: an unread list item -
listfocus_unread
: the currently selected unread list item -
title
(added in 2.25): current dialog’s title, which is usually at the top of the screen (but seeshow-title-bar
andswap-title-and-hints
). If you don’t specify a style for this element, then theinfo
style is used -
info
: the hints bar, which is usually at the bottom of the screen (but seeshow-keymap-hint
andswap-title-and-hints
) -
hint-key
(added in 2.25): a key in the hints bar. If you don’t specify a style for this element, then theinfo
style is used -
hint-keys-delimiter
(added in 2.25): the comma that separates keys in the hints bar. If you don’t specify a style for this element, then theinfo
style is used -
hint-separator
(added in 2.25): the colon separating keys from their descriptions in the hints bar. If you don’t specify a style for this element, then theinfo
style is used -
hint-description
(added in 2.25): a description of a key in the hints bar. If you don’t specify a style for this element, then theinfo
style is used -
article
: the article text -
end-of-text-marker
: filler lines (~) below blocks of text
The default color configuration of Newsboat looks like this:
color background white black color listnormal white black color listfocus yellow blue bold color listnormal_unread magenta black color listfocus_unread magenta blue bold color title yellow blue bold color info yellow blue bold color hint-key yellow blue bold color hint-keys-delimiter yellow white color hint-separator yellow white bold color hint-description yellow white color article white black
4.8. Files
By default, Newsboat stores all the files in a traditional Unix fashion, i.e. in a "dotdir" located at ~/.newsboat. However, it also supports a modern way, XDG Base Directory Specification, which splits the files between the following locations:
-
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/newsboat/ (
XDG_CONFIG_HOME
defaults to ~/.config) -
$XDG_DATA_HOME/newsboat/ (
XDG_DATA_HOME
defaults to ~/.local/share)
If the newsboat directory exists under XDG_CONFIG_HOME
, then Newsboat will
use XDG directories (creating the data directory if necessary). Otherwise,
Newsboat will default to ~/.newsboat.
If you’re currently using ~/.newsboat/ but wish to migrate to XDG directories, you should move the files as follows:
- config, urls
-
to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/newsboat/
- cache.db, history.search, history.cmdline, queue
-
to $XDG_DATA_HOME/newsboat/
Newsboat and Podboat also create "lock files". These prevent you from starting two instances of the same program, and thus from corrupting your data. Newsboat and Podboat remove these files when you quit the program, so there is no need to copy them anywhere — just be aware of them in case you write scripts that work with cache.db or queue. By default, lock files are located as follows:
dotdir | XDG | |
---|---|---|
Newsboat |
~/.newsboat/cache.db.lock |
$XDG_DATA_HOME/newsboat/cache.db.lock |
Podboat |
~/.newsboat/pb-lock.pid |
$XDG_DATA_HOME/newsboat/.lock |
Newsboat places the lock file next to the cache file, so if you specify
cache-file setting or pass --cache-file
command-line argument,
the path to the lock file will change too. Podboat, on the other hand, always
places its lock file as shown above.
5. Migrating from other RSS Feed Readers
It is very likely that you have used other RSS feed readers before. In this case, it is practical to migrate the previous configuration to Newsboat.
5.1. Newsbeuter (automatic migration)
Newsboat is a fork of Newsbeuter, so the migration from the latter is partially automated. Simple enough configurations will be transferred without any user intervention, while more complicated ones might require a little tweaking afterwards.
To prevent data loss, please check the results before deleting your old
configuration. Pay extra attention to files that you include
in your
configuration—you’d probably want to manually copy them over to Newsboat
directories, and possibly update the include paths.
Migration from Newsbeuter is attempted on startup if the following conditions are met:
-
none of
-u
,-c
,-C
options were specified; and -
the urls file doesn’t exist (neither ~/.newsboat/urls nor $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/newsboat/urls).
Newsboat first tries to migrate an XDG configuration, and if that fails, it tries the dotdir one. If that fails as well, Newsboat proceeds with the startup as usual.
XDG migration checks that:
-
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/newsbeuter/ is readable and executable; and
-
neither $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/newsboat/ nor $XDG_DATA_HOME/newsboat/ exist.
If both conditions are met, Newsboat tries to create its XDG dirs (aborting the migration if that fails), then copies the following files: urls and config from config dir; cache.db, queue, history.search, history.cmdline from data dir.
Dotdir migration checks that ~/.newsbeuter/ is readable and executable, and ~/.newsboat/ doesn’t exist. If those conditions are met, it tries to create ~/.newsboat/ (aborting the migration if that fails), then copies the following files: urls, cache.db, config, queue, history.search, history.cmdline.
There’s one scenario where the process breaks: if you have an XDG configuration for Newsbeuter, ~/.newsboat/ exists and ~/.newsboat/urls doesn’t exist, then Newsboat will migrate XDG files and proceed, ignoring the dotdir. Please don’t confuse the poor program like that!
5.2. Other readers (via OPML)
The vast amount of RSS feed readers allows the export of subscriptions via OPML files. OPML is an XML file format that was designed to save outlines, and has found its primary use in the import and export of feed subscriptions between different RSS feed readers.
The best thing to start with is to export your subscriptions from the old reader. Usually, RSS feed readers have appropriate menu items available to do so.
Snownews 1.7+ stores its subscriptions natively in OPML, in ~/.config/snownews/urls.opml. Earlier versions provide an export script:
snow2opml > ~/blogroll.opml
To export the subscription list from raggle, the following command is necessary:
raggle --export-opml ~/blogroll.opml
You can then import subscriptions into Newsboat:
newsboat -i ~/blogroll.opml
Don’t worry, Newsboat won’t destroy your existing configuration, or add subscriptions more than once: every URL that is added to the subscription list is checked before whether it is already in the list, and is only added if not. This makes it possible to merge several OPML files into your subscription list.
If your old RSS feed reader was able to structure your subscriptions in hierarchies, and reflected this structure in the exported OPML file, Newsboat doesn’t throw away this information (although it doesn’t support hierarchies), but generates tags from it. Tags are Newsboat’s way of organizing subscriptions in a non-hierarchical way. More information on the use of tags can be found below.
Imagine the following folder hierarchy:
|- News | |- Europe | `- International |- IT | |- Linux | |- Windows | `- Programming | |- C++ | |- Ruby | `- Erlang `- Private
Subscriptions found in the folder "Private" will be tagged with "Private", subscriptions in the folder "International" will be tagged with "News" and "News/International", subscriptions in the folder "Erlang" will be tagged ith "IT", "IT/Programming" and "IT/Programming/Erlang", and so on. This means that when you select the tag "Programming" in Newsboat, you will see all subscriptions that were in the "Programming" folder or one of its subfolders before. This means that you will lose virtually nothing of your previously configured structure.
6. Newsboat as a Client for Newsreading Services
Newsboat is a perfectly capable feedreader in its own right, but it can’t cover all the use-cases. For example, you might want to synchronize your news between devices, or you don’t have a computer that’s running 24/7 to fetch your feeds. In such cases, you might register with some online feedreader, and use Newsboat as a client. The next few sections provide configuration instructions for each supported service.
6.1. The Old Reader
The Old Reader is a successor to Google Reader. In order to use it, you first need to configure the proper URL source:
urls-source "oldreader"
In addition, Newsboat needs to know your The Old Reader username and password so that it can authenticate with the service:
oldreader-login "your-oldreader-account" oldreader-password "your-password"
Note that double quotes and backslashes in your password should be escaped.
See also oldreader-passwordfile
,
oldreader-passwordeval
, and
Passwords for external APIs.
After setting these configuration values, you can start Newsboat. It will authenticate with The Old Reader and download your subscription list.
When you mark single items or complete feeds as read, Newsboat will synchronize this information directly to The Old Reader. This, of course, includes opening articles. Toggling read articles back to "unread" is also communicated to The Old Reader.
In addition, The Old Reader provides the ability to "star" and to "share" articles. Starred articles are basically bookmarks, while shared articles are shown to people that follow your The Old Reader account. Newsboat allows the use of this feature by mapping its powerful "flags" to the "star"/"unstar" resp. "share"/"unshare" operations.
In order to use this mapping, all you need to do is to configure the flags that shall be used:
oldreader-flag-share "a" oldreader-flag-star "b"
After that, use these flags when you edit flags for an article, and these articles will be starred resp. shared.
By default, Newsboat also shows The Old Reader "special feeds":
-
People you follow: articles shared by people that you follow.
-
Starred items: articles that you starred.
-
Shared items: articles that you shared.
You can disable these feeds by setting the following configuration variable:
oldreader-show-special-feeds no
The Old Reader’s folders are converted into Newsboat tags. You can select and filter feeds by tags; see Tagging and Filter Language for details.
6.2. NewsBlur
NewsBlur is a successor to Google Reader. To use it, set
your urls-source
:
urls-source "newsblur"
Then, configure your NewsBlur credentials:
newsblur-login "your-newsblur-account" newsblur-password "your-password"
Note that double quotes and backslashes in your password should be escaped.
See also newsblur-passwordfile
,
newsblur-passwordeval
, and
Passwords for external APIs.
Finally, set a path to the file where Newsboat can store the HTTP cookies:
cookie-cache "~/.newsboat/cookies.txt"
When you start Newsboat, it will download the feeds that you configured in NewsBlur. Please take a closer look at the configuration commands for what you can configure in Newsboat regarding NewsBlur.
NewsBlur’s folders are converted into Newsboat tags. You can select and filter feeds by tags; see Tagging and Filter Language for details. NewsBlur’s starring/saving feature is currently unsupported by Newsboat.
6.3. FeedHQ
FeedHQ is a successor to Google Reader. Configuration basically works the same as with The Old Reader.
First, set your urls-source
:
urls-source "feedhq"
Then, configure your FeedHQ credentials:
feedhq-login "your-feedhq-account" feedhq-password "your-password"
Note that double quotes and backslashes in your password should be escaped.
See also feedhq-passwordfile
,
feedhq-passwordeval
, and
Passwords for external APIs.
If you’re using a standalone instance, you should add one more setting:
feedhq-url "https://the.url.of/your/feedhq/instance"
When you start Newsboat, it will download the feeds that you configured in FeedHQ. Please take a closer look at the configuration commands for what you can configure in Newsboat regarding FeedHQ.
FeedHQ’s folders are converted into Newsboat tags. You can select and filter feeds by tags; see Tagging and Filter Language for details.
6.4. Bazqux
Bazqux uses "Google Reader API", which is also used by other readers like FeedHQ. Thus, one can leverage Newsboat’s support for FeedHQ (described above) to synchronize with Bazqux:
urls-source "feedhq" feedhq-url "https://bazqux.com/" feedhq-login "username" feedhq-password "password"
See Passwords for external APIs for other, more secure ways to store your password.
6.5. FreshRSS
Supported since Newsboat 2.24.
FreshRSS is a self-hosted feed reader that also uses a "Google Reader API", but is incompatable with the FeedHQ API. To use FreshRSS support, ensure that API access is enabled in the Authentication settings for your server, and that you have set an API password for your user Profile. Then point Newsboat to your server:
urls-source "freshrss" freshrss-url "https://freshrss.example.com/api/greader.php" freshrss-login "myusername" freshrss-password "mypassword"
See Passwords for external APIs for other, more secure ways to store your password.
Newsboat will request 20 articles by default. Change this with e.g.
freshrss-min-items 100
FreshRSS provides the ability to "favourite"/"star" articles. Starred articles are basically bookmarks. Newsboat allows the use of these features by mapping its flags to the "star" operation.
In order to use this mapping, you need to configure the flag that should be used:
freshrss-flag-star "s"
After that, use this flag when you edit flags for an article, and these articles will be starred.
By default a "Starred Items" feed is included in the feed list. This can be removed with:
freshrss-show-special-feeds "false"
FreshRSS categories are converted into Newsboat tags. You can select and filter feeds by tags; see Tagging and Filter Language for details.
6.6. Tiny Tiny RSS
Newsboat can be used to synchronize with Tiny Tiny RSS installations. Tiny Tiny RSS is a web-based and (optionally) multi-user feed reader.
If you want to use Tiny Tiny RSS support, don’t forget to activate the external API support in your preferences.
To use Tiny Tiny RSS support, you need to configure a few things. First of all, Newsboat needs to know that you want to use Tiny Tiny RSS and which installation exactly:
urls-source "ttrss" ttrss-url "https://example.com/ttrss/"
In addition, it requires username and password for authentication:
ttrss-login "myusername" ttrss-password "mypassword"
Note that double quotes and backslashes in your password should be escaped.
See also ttrss-passwordfile
,
ttrss-passwordeval
, and
Passwords for external APIs.
Tiny Tiny RSS provides two modes of usage: single-user mode and multi-user mode. Newsboat needs to know about this, too: in single-user mode, authentication is done via Basic HTTP authentication, while in multi-user mode, authentication is done against Tiny Tiny RSS itself.
ttrss-mode "single" # "multi" is default
If Tiny Tiny RSS is configured in multi-user mode and still deployed behind an
additional HTTP-BasicAuth, the required username and password (which may deviate
from ttrss-login
and ttrss-password
) can
be specified in the user-part of the url like this:
ttrss-url "https://htuser:htpasswd@example.com/ttrss/"
With these settings, Newsboat should be able to connect to Tiny Tiny RSS and download your subscribed feeds. Articles or even complete feeds that you marked as read are synchronized directly to Tiny Tiny RSS.
Tiny Tiny RSS provides the ability to "star" and to "publish" articles. Starred articles are basically bookmarks, while published articles can be retrieved via a public RSS feed. Newsboat allows the use of these features by mapping its flags to the "star" and "publish" operations.
In order to use this mapping, you need to configure the flags that shall be used:
ttrss-flag-star "s" ttrss-flag-publish "p"
After that, use these flags when you edit flags for an article, and these articles will be starred resp. published.
TT-RSS folders are converted into Newsboat tags. You can select and filter feeds by tags; see Tagging and Filter Language for details.
6.7. ownCloud News and nextCloud News
Supported since Newsboat 2.10.
ownCloud News and nextCloud News implement the same protocol, so Newsboat treats them as equivalent. Instructions below apply to both.
First, set your urls-source
to ocnews
and tell Newsboat
where to find your ownCloud instance:
urls-source "ocnews" ocnews-url "https://localhost/owncloud"
Username and password are required:
ocnews-login "user" ocnews-password "password"
See also ocnews-passwordfile
,
ocnews-passwordeval
, and Passwords for external APIs.
ownCloud News API uses HTTP basic auth, therefore running ownCloud with SSL is highly recommended. If for any reason you don’t want Newsboat to verify the hostname of your instance against the hostname specified in the SSL certificate you’re using, just say so:
ocnews-verifyhost "no"
If you see intermittent "Authentication failed" errors, try configuring memory caching. That should improve the responsiveness of the API and fix the errors.
ownCloud News provides the ability to "star" articles; starred articles are basically bookmarks. Newsboat allows the use of this feature by mapping user-specified flag to the "star" operation.
In order to use this mapping, you need to configure the flag that shall be used:
ocnews-flag-star "s"
OwnCloud News' folders are converted into Newsboat tags. You can select and filter feeds by tags; see Tagging and Filter Language for details.
6.8. Inoreader
Supported since Newsboat 2.10.2.
⚠
|
As of 2022-04-21, this only works for Inoreader Pro users, and only if they don’t have too many feeds and/or don’t reload them too often. |
⚠
|
As of 2021-08-23, Inoreader’s API doesn’t list enclosures, so Newsboat won’t display podcasts, cover images etc. |
Inoreader is a successor to Google Reader.
To use Newsboat with Inoreader, you should first get an Inoreader Pro subscription and register your own application. This is needed because app credentials have to be kept secret, and Newsboat developers don’t want to operate a proxy needed to achieve that.
Please note that API requests to Inoreader are rate-limited, so you might have
problems reloading a lot of feeds, or doing so often. Keep this in mind when
enabling auto-reload
or lowering
reload-time
.
With app ID and key in hand, tell Newsboat you’d like to use Inoreader:
urls-source "inoreader" inoreader-app-id "INSERT_ID_HERE" inoreader-app-key "INSERT_KEY_HERE"
In addition, Newsboat needs to know your Inoreader username and password so that it can authenticate with Inoreader. Note that this is NOT your login with your Google or Facebook account. If you use one of those to login to Inoreader, you have to create a username and password in Inoreader Preferences > Profile
inoreader-login "your-inoreader-account" inoreader-password "your-password"
Note that double quotes and backslashes in your password should be escaped.
See also inoreader-passwordfile
,
inoreader-passwordeval
, and Passwords for external APIs.
After setting these configuration values, you can start Newsboat. It will authenticate with Inoreader and download your subscription list. If you use "folders" in Inoreader to organize your feeds, Newsboat will make them available via its "tags" capability: each feed is tagged with the name of the folder in which it resides. You can select and filter feeds by tags; see Tagging and Filter Language sections for details.
When you mark single items or complete feeds as read, Newsboat will synchronize this information directly to Inoreader. This, of course, includes opening articles. Toggling read articles back to "unread" is also communicated to Inoreader.
In addition, Inoreader provides the ability to "star" and to "share" articles. Starred articles are basically bookmarks, while shared articles are shown to people that follow your Inoreader account. Newsboat allows the use of this feature by mapping its powerful "flags" to the "star"/"unstar" resp. "share"/"unshare" operations.
In order to use this mapping, all you need to do is to configure the flags that shall be used:
inoreader-flag-share "a" inoreader-flag-star "b"
After that, use these flags when you edit flags for an article, and these articles will be starred resp. shared.
By default, Newsboat also shows Inoreader "special feeds":
-
Starred items
-
Shared items
-
Liked items
-
Saved web pages
You can disable these feeds by setting the following configuration variable:
inoreader-show-special-feeds no
6.9. Miniflux
Supported since Newsboat 2.21.
⚠
|
As of 2021-10-06, Miniflux’s API doesn’t list enclosures, so Newsboat won’t display podcasts, cover images etc. |
Miniflux is a "minimalist and opinionated feed reader" that is self-hostable.
Newsboat can synchronize with Miniflux installations as an alternative to the web front-end.
To configure Miniflux support, set the urls-source option and provide the url to the Miniflux instance to be used:
urls-source "miniflux" miniflux-url "https://example.com/miniflux/"
In addition, Miniflux requires username and password for authentication:
miniflux-login "myusername" miniflux-password "mypassword"
Note that double quotes and backslashes in your password should be escaped.
See also miniflux-passwordfile
,
miniflux-passwordeval
, and
Passwords for external APIs.
When a username/password are specified, the Miniflux backend will default to
using the basic
HTTP authentication method, since Newsboat sends extraneous
requests when trying to determine the appropriate method automatically. If your
Miniflux instance uses a special setup that doesn’t function with basic
authentication, it may be necessary to explicitly set the http-auth-method
variable in the configuration.
It is also possible to specify an API token instead of the username/password combination:
miniflux-token "my-api-token"
See also miniflux-tokenfile
, and
miniflux-tokeneval
.
Unlike with other backends, Miniflux’s starring/bookmarking feature is not currently supported in Newsboat.
Miniflux categories are converted into Newsboat tags. You can select and filter feeds by tags; see Tagging and Filter Language for details.
6.10. OPML Online Subscription Mode
This mode provides one-way synchronization of subscriptions from the online service to Newsboat. In other words, Newsboat will know what feeds you’ve subscribed to, but the online service won’t know what feeds you’re reading in Newsboat.
This mode works with any service that publishes your subscriptions in OPML format.
To enable this mode, you need to set an appropriate URLs source and then tell Newsboat where to get the OPML file(s):
urls-source "opml" opml-url "https://example.com/feeds.opml" "https://example.com/more.opml"
6.11. Passwords for external APIs
There are a number of ways to specify a password, each represented by a separate setting. Newsboat looks for settings in certain order, and uses the first one that it finds. The exact order is described below.
Settings are prefixed by API names; e.g. newsblur-password
,
feedhq-passwordeval
. All APIs support all the settings, so examples below use
REMOTEAPI
for prefix. Replace it with the name of the remote API you use.
The first setting Newsboat checks is REMOTEAPI-password
. It should contain the
password in plain text.
The second setting Newsboat checks is REMOTEAPI-passwordfile
. It should
contain a path to a file; the first line of that file should contain the
password in plain text. If the file doesn’t exit, is unreadable, or its first
line is empty, Newsboat will exit with an error.
The third setting Newsboat checks is REMOTEAPI-passwordeval
. It should
contain a command that, when executed, will print out the password to stdout.
stderr will be passed through to the terminal.
If the first line of command’s output is empty, or the command fails to execute, Newsboat will exit with an error. This is the most versatile of all the options, because it lets you emulate every other and more; let’s look at it in more detail.
For example, a user might want to store their password in a file encrypted by GPG. They create the file like that:
$ gpg --encrypt --default-recipient-self --output ~/.newsboat/password.gpg
They enter their password, press Enter, and finish the command by pressing Ctrl+D. Then, they specify in their Newsboat config:
REMOTEAPI-passwordeval "gpg --decrypt ~/.newsboat/password.gpg"
Now every time they start Newsboat, GPG will be ran. It’ll probably ask for keyring password, then decrypt the file, and pass its contents to Newsboat, which will use it to authenticate with the remote API.
Note that Newsboat will keep the password in memory the entire time Newsboat is running. Other programs might be able to dump the memory and obtain the password. We don’t currently have any protection from that; patches are welcome.
The user might use any other command here; for example, they could fetch the password from GNOME keyring, KeePass, or somewhere else entirely. The possibilities are truly endless.
If none of the aforementioned settings were found, Newsboat will ask the user for the password using an interactive prompt. If the password that the user enters is empty, Newsboat will give up and exit with an error.
7. Advanced Features
7.1. Tagging
Newsboat comes with the possibility to categorize or "tag", as we call it, RSS feeds. Every RSS feed can be assigned 0 or more tags. Within Newsboat, you can then select to only show RSS feeds that match a certain tag. That makes it easy to categorize your feeds in a flexible and powerful way.
Usually, the urls file contains one RSS feed URL per line. To assign a tag to
an RSS feed, simply attach it as a single word, separated by blanks such as
space or tab. If the tag needs to contain spaces, you must use quotes ("
)
around the tag (see example below). An example urls file may look like this:
https://blog.fefe.de/rss.xml?html interesting conspiracy news "cool stuff" https://rss.orf.at/news.xml news orf https://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise.rdf news interesting
When you now start Newsboat with this configuration, you can press T to select a tag. When you select the tag "news", you will see all three RSS feeds. Pressing T again and e.g. selecting the "conspiracy" tag, you will only see the https://blog.fefe.de/rss.xml?html RSS feed. Pressing Ctrl+T clears the current tag, and again shows all RSS feeds, regardless of their assigned tags.
A special type of tag are tags that start with the tilde character (~
). When such
a tag is found, the feed title is set to the tag name (excluding the ~
character).
These type of tags are ignored when any kind of "first tag" property is used.
With this feature, you can give feeds any title you want in your feed list:
https://rss.orf.at/news.xml "~ORF News"
Another special type of tag are tags that start with the exclamation mark (!
). When
such a tag is found, the feed is hidden from the regular list of feeds and its
content can only be found through a query feed.
https://rss.orf.at/news.xml ! news http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml ! news "query:News from around the globe:tags # \"news\""
In this example, the first two feeds won’t appear in the feedlist, but their articles will still be accessible through the query feed titled "News from around the globe". The "hidden" tags in this example don’t even have names, because their only use is to hide the feed that they’re tagging.
7.2. Scripts and Filters (Snownews Extensions)
Newsboat contains support for Snownews extensions. The RSS feed readers Snownews and Liferea share a common way of extending the readers with custom scripts. Two mechanisms, namely "execurl" and "filter" type scripts, are available and supported by Newsboat.
An "execurl" script can be any program that gets executed and whose output is interpreted as RSS feed, while "filter" scripts are fed with the content of a configured URL and whose output is interpreted as RSS feed.
The configuration is simple and straight-forward. Just add to your urls file configuration lines like the following ones:
exec:~/bin/execurl-script filter:~/bin/filter-script:https://some.test/url
The first line shows how to add an execurl script to your configuration: start
the line with exec:
and then immediately append the path of the script that
shall be executed. If this script requires additional parameters, simply use
quotes (see Using Double Quotes for details):
"exec:~/bin/execurl-script param1 param2"
The second line shows how to add a filter script to your configuration: start
the line with filter:
, then immediately append the path of the script, then
append a colon (:
), and then append the URL of the file that shall be fed to
the script. Again, if the script requires any parameters,
simply quote the whole thing:
"filter:~/bin/filter-script param1 param2:https://url/foobar"
In both cases, the tagging feature as described above is still available:
exec:~/bin/execurl-script tag1 tag2 "quoted tag" filter:~/bin/filter-script:https://some.test/url tag3 tag4 tag5
If you need to write your own extension, see this short guide for an introduction. A collection of existing scripts and filters might help, too.
Newsboat comes with an example exec script which shows one way to generate an RSS channel. It also includes a way to see which exact arguments are passed to the script by Newsboat. This example can be found in the doc/examples subdirectory.
7.3. Bookmarking
This feature lets you save links from the article list, the article view, and
the URL view. The actual bookmarking is performed by a program that you specify
via the bookmark-cmd
setting; Newsboat merely supplies the
data.
To bookmark the currently selected item, press ^B
(invoking the
bookmark
operation), and Newsboat will ask you for:
-
the URL to bookmark (already preset with the URL of the current selection);
-
the bookmark title (in most cases preset with the title of the current selection);
-
the bookmark description (default empty); and
-
(since Newsboat 2.10) the title of the feed you’re currently in (preset as you’d expect).
(If you find that the above preset values always work for you, enable
bookmark-autopilot
to avoid being asked anything.)
After that, the program configured via bookmark-cmd
is executed. It is given
four arguments, the same ones and in the same order as described above. The
program then does the actual bookmark saving, e.g. writing the bookmark into an
external file, or storing it to a del.icio.us account.
If everything goes OK, the program simply exits. In case something goes wrong, the program writes out an error message to stdout as a single line. This error message is then presented to the user from within Newsboat. At the moment, Newsboat doesn’t care about the exit code of the program; only its output is used to determine success.
Some bookmarking commands are interactive, e.g. they might want you to select
a category for your bookmark, or a Mastodon account from which to share the
bookmark. Oftentimes you can specify defaults for these, but if you can’t,
enable bookmark-interactive
: it will make Newsboat
relinquish the terminal to the bookmarking program. You’ll be able to make all
the changes there, and will return to Newsboat once the bookmarking program
exits.
Newsboat comes with an example plugin, doc/examples/example-bookmark-plugin.sh, which implements a simple tab-separated bookmark file. You can use that as a starting point to write your own bookmarking program.
7.4. Command Line
Like other text-oriented software, Newsboat contains an internal commandline to modify configuration variables ad hoc and to run own commands. It provides a flexible access to the functionality of Newsboat which is especially useful for advanced users.
To start the commandline, type :. You will see a ":" prompt at the bottom of
the screen, similar to tools like vi(m) or mutt. You can now enter commands.
Pressing the Enter key executes the command (possibly giving feedback to the
user) and closes the commandline. You can cancel entering commands by pressing
the Esc key. The history of all the commands that you enter will be saved to
the history.cmdline file, stored next to the cache.db file. The backlog is
limited to 100 entries by default, but can be influenced by setting the
history-limit
configuration variable. To disable history
saving, set the history-limit
to 0
.
The commandline provides you with some help if you can’t remember the full
names of commandline commands. By pressing the Tab key, Newsboat will try to
automatically complete your command. If there is more than one possible
completion, you can subsequently press the Tab key to cycle through all
results. If no match is found, no suggestion will be inserted into the
commandline. For the set
command, the completion also works for configuration
variable names.
In addition, some common key combination such as Ctrl+G (to cancel input), Ctrl+K (to delete text from the cursor position to the end of line), Ctrl+U (to clear the whole line) and Ctrl+W (to delete the word before the current cursor position) were added.
Please be aware that the input history of both the command line and the search
functions are saved to the filesystems, to the files history.cmdline resp.
history.search (stored next to the cache.db file). By default, the last 100
entries are saved, but this can be configured (configuration variable
history-limit
) and also totally disabled (by setting said
variable to 0
).
Currently, the following command line commands are available:
Quit Newsboat.
Alias for quit.
Export the currently selected article to a plain text file. This works in the article list and in the article view.
Set configuration variable <variable> to <value>. If no value is specified, the current value is printed out. Specifying a ! after the name of boolean configuration variables toggles their values, a & directly after the name of a configuration variable of any type resets its value to the documented default value.
Only display feeds with the tag <tagname>.
Search for a feed whose name contains the case-insensitive substring.
Load the specified configuration files. This allows it to load alternative configuration files or reload already loaded configuration files on-the-fly from the filesystem.
Save current internal state of configuration to file, so that it can be instantly reused as configuration file.
Run a keybind operation in the current context.
Jump to the entry with the index <number> (usually seen at the left side of the list). This currently works for the feed list, article list, tag selection and filter selection forms.
7.5. Filter Language
Newsboat provides a powerful filter language that enables the user to filter the content of many dialogs, such as the feed list or the article list. The basic concept is that every feed and every article has a number of attributes which can then be compared with user-supplied values, and these comparisons and be logically AND’ed, OR’ed and grouped.
Examples for simple filter expressions are:
unread_count > 0 rssurl =~ "^https:" age between 0:10
Logically connecting and grouping such expressions looks like in the following examples:
( unread_count > 0 and unread_count < 10 ) or total_count > 100 ( author =~ "Frank" or author =~ "John" ) and ( title =~ "Linux" or title =~ "FreeBSD" )
The possibilities for combining such queries is endless, sky (actually: the available memory) is the limit.
To filter your feeds, press "F" in the feed list, enter your filter expression, and press "Enter". To clear the filter, press "Ctrl-F". To filter the articles in the article list, press "F", enter your expression, and press "Enter". Clearing the filter works the same as before. Be aware that only certain attributes work in both dialogs. The table below lists all available attributes and their context, i.e. an attribute that belongs to a feed can only be matched in the feed list, while an attribute that belongs to an article can only be matched in the article list.
Operator | Meaning |
---|---|
= / == |
test for equality |
!= |
test for inequality; logical negation of the = operator |
=~ |
test whether POSIX extended regular expression matches, case-insensitively |
!~ |
logical negation of the =~ operator |
< |
less than |
> |
greater than |
<= |
less than or equal |
>= |
greater than or equal |
between |
within a range of integer values, where the two integer values are separated by a colon (see above for an example) |
# |
contains; this operator matches if a word is contained in a list of space-separated words (useful for matching tags, see below) |
!# |
contains not; the negation of the # operator |
Attribute | Context | Meaning |
---|---|---|
article |
article title |
|
article |
article link |
|
article |
article author |
|
article |
article body |
|
article |
publication date of the article |
|
article |
a unique identifier of the article |
|
article |
indicates whether the article has been read |
|
article |
the URL of an enclosure (e.g. podcast file), empty if there is no enclosure |
|
article |
the MIME type of the enclosure, empty if there is no enclosure |
|
article |
The set of flags of the article |
|
article |
Age of an article (in days) |
|
article |
Index of an article in an article list |
|
feed, article |
title of the feed |
|
feed, article |
feed description |
|
feed, article |
link to the feed |
|
feed, article |
publication date of the feed |
|
feed, article |
RSS URL of the feed |
|
feed, article |
number of unread articles in the feed |
|
feed, article |
total number of articles in the feed |
|
feed, article |
space-separated list of tags that are associated with the feed. Note that for tags that have spaces in them, it’s impossible to tell where they start and end, so # and !# operators don’t work for such tags. |
|
feed, article |
Index of a feed in the feed list |
Note that it’s also possible to filter for feed attributes when you query for article attributes. This is because every article is internally linked to the feed from which it was downloaded.
7.6. Killfiles
Sometimes, a user is confronted with certain content they don’t want to read, e.g. on topics the user is not interested in or articles written by certain people. In Usenet, such functionality within software is traditionally called a "killfile", i.e. based on the content of this "killfile", articles that match certain conditions do not get displayed and are not presented to the user at all.
In Newsboat, such a "killfile" can be implemented on a per-article basis via
the configuration file. The most important configuration command for this
is ignore-article
:
ignore-article "https://synflood.at/blog/index.php?/feeds/index.rss2" "title =~ \"newsboat\"" ignore-article "regex:https?://nitter.net/.*" "title =~ \"^RT by\"" ignore-article "*" "title =~ \"Gentoo\""
It takes two parameters. The first one is either:
-
The URL of a feed.
-
A pattern prefixed with
regex:
. The pattern must be a POSIX extended regular expression, which will be matched case-insensitive. -
"*"
to match any feed (asterisk is not a pattern, glob or regex—we simply reserve it to mean "all feeds").
The second argument is a filter expression for an article,
probably in double quotes to preserve spaces inside. If
Newsboat hits an article in the specified RSS feed that matches the specified
filter expression, then this article is ignored and never presented to the user.
The configuration itself can contain as many ignore-article
commands as desired.
You can also specify the way an article is ignored. There are two ways available:
-
During download: articles are ignored when a feed is downloaded and parsed, and thus won’t be written to the local cache.
-
During display: articles are downloaded and written to the local cache, but are ignored when a feed is displayed.
Both modes have their advantages and disadvantages: while the download ignore mode saves some storage, you cannot simply "undo" the ignore by removing it from the configuration file: if an ignored article has already vanished from a feed, it won’t reappear. On the other hand, the display ignore mode requires some more space, but has the advantage that an ignore can be "undone" by removing the ignore-article configuration command from the configuration.
The default ignore mode is "download"
. You can set the ignore-mode
in the
configuration file:
ignore-mode "display"
7.7. Query Feeds
Query feeds are a mechanism of Newsboat to define custom "meta feeds" by using Newsboat’s built-in filter language. A query feed is a feed that is aggregated from all currently downloaded articles of all feeds. To narrow down the set of articles, the user has to specify a filter. Only articles that match this filter are added to the query feed.
A query feed is updated whenever it is entered in the feed list. When you
change the unread flag of an article, this is reflected in the feed where the
article was originally fetched. If you want query feeds to be updated at
startup, set prepopulate-query-feeds
to yes
.
To define a query feed, the user has to add a line to the urls file in the following format:
query:<name of feed>:<filter expression> [<tag> ...]
The query:
in the beginning tells Newsboat that it’s a query feed, <name of
feed>
specifies the name under which the query feed shall be displayed in the
feed list, and <filter expression>
is the filter expression that shall be
used. Like every other feed, a query feed can be tagged to organize it like
a regular feed.
This feature is often used to create a feed that contains all unread articles:
"query:Unread Articles:unread = \"yes\""
Note the use of double quotes to preserve spaces in the filter expression.
If you want to combine several feeds to one single feed, a good solution is to tag the feeds that you want to combine with one certain tag, and then create a query feed that only displays articles from feeds with that certain tag:
https://domain1.tld/feed.xml fun news tag1 https://domain2.tld/?feed.rss private jokes tag1 https://domain3.tld/feeds.rss news "query:tag1 Articles:tags # \"tag1\""
In this example, the feeds https://domain1.tld/feed.xml and https://domain2.tld/?feed.rss are aggregated into the query feed named "tag1 Articles", but the feed https://domain3.tld/feeds.rss is not.
Basically, the possibility of what can be realized with query feeds is only limited by what can be queried from articles and feeds with the filter language and by your creativity.
7.8. Flagging Articles
To support custom categorization of articles by the user, it is possible to flag an article. A valid flag is any character from A to Z and from a to z. Every article can be flagged with up to 52 different flags, i.e. every letter from the Roman alphabet in upper and lower case. Flagging is easy: just select an article in the article list, or enter the article view, and press "Ctrl-E". This will start the flag editor. By pressing "Enter", the new flags are saved. You can cancel by pressing the "Esc" key.
The flags of an article can be used in every filter expression. The flags of an article are always ordered, and when new flags are added, ordering is immediately restored. This behaviour can also be relied upon when querying articles via the filter language.
If an article contains one or more flags, it is marked with an "!" in the article list. In the article view, all flags (if available) are listed.
7.9. Commandline Commands
Newsboat comes with a -x
option that indicates that commands added as arguments
to the command line shall be executed. Currently, the following commands are
available:
-
reload
: this option reloads all feeds, and quits Newsboat without printing any output. This is useful if a user wants to periodically reload all feeds without always having a running Newsboat instance, e.g. from cron. -
print-unread
: this option prints the number of unread articles and quits Newsboat. This is useful for users who want to integrate this number into some kind of monitoring system.
7.10. Format Strings
Newsboat contains a powerful format string system to make it possible for the user to configure the format of various aspects of the application, such as the format of entries in the feed list or in the article list.
Format strings are similar to those that are found in the printf
function in
the C programming language. A format sequence begins with the % character,
followed by optional alignment indication: positive numbers indicate that the
text that is inserted for the sequence shall be padded on the left to a total
width that is specified by the number, while negative number specify padding on
the right. Followed by the padding indication comes the actual sequence
identifier, which is usually a single letter. %=[width][identifier]
centers
the sequence, where if w=0 the whole width of the window is used.
In addition, Newsboat provides other, more powerful sequences, such as
%>[char]
, which indicates that the text right to the sequence will be aligned
right on the screen, and characters between the text on the left and the text
on the right will be filled by [char]
. Another powerful format is the
conditional sequence, %?[char]?[format 1]&[format 2]?
: if the text of the
sequence identifier [char]
contains any non-whitespace characters, then
[format 1]
will be evaluated and inserted, otherwise [format 2]
will be
evaluated and inserted. The &
and [format 2]
are optional, i.e. if the
identifier’s text is empty, then an empty string will be inserted.
The following tables show what sequence identifiers are available for which format:
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Feed description |
|
Feed index |
|
Feed link |
|
Feed RSS URL |
|
"unread" flag field |
|
download status |
|
Feed title |
|
First tag of a feed in the URLs file |
|
"unread/total" field |
|
"unread" field |
|
"total" field |
While a reload-all
operation is running, the download status indicates the
download status of a feed, which can be "to be downloaded" (indicated by "_"),
"currently downloading" (indicated by "."), successfully downloaded (indicated
by " ") and "download error" (indicated by "x").
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Article author |
|
Publication date. This can be tweaked further with datetime-format |
|
Two characters: 1) "N" if article is unread, "D" if article is deleted, a space otherwise; 2) "!" if article has flags, a space otherwise. |
|
"unread" field |
|
"deleted" field |
|
Article flags |
|
Article index |
|
Article title |
|
If the article list displays articles from different feeds, then this identifier contains the title of the feed to which the article belongs. |
|
Article length |
|
Article enclosure URL |
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Line’s index in the list |
|
The tag this line corresponds to |
|
Number of unread feeds under this tag |
|
Number of unread articles in feeds tagged with this tag |
|
Number of feeds tagged with this tag |
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Number of unread articles |
|
Number of unread feeds |
|
Number of new unread articles (i.e. that were added through the last reload) |
|
Number of new unread feeds (i.e. that were added through the last reload) |
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Download index |
|
Currently downloaded size in megabytes, displays one digit of precision |
|
Total download size in megabytes, displays one digit of precision |
|
Downloaded precentage, displays one digit of precision |
|
Download speed, displays two digit of precision, always in KB/s (does not include the "KB/s" text) |
|
Download speed, displays two digit of precision, human readable (automatically switches between KB/s, MB/s, and GB/s) |
|
Status of download, displays one of the folowing; "queued", "downloading", "ready", "canceled", "deleted", "incomplete", "played", "finished" or "failed" |
|
Url of the download |
|
Absolute filename of the download from the root directory (e.g. ~/downloads/podcast.mp3 → /home/name/downloads/podcast.mp3) |
|
Basename of the download (e.g. /home/name/downloads/podcast.mp3 → podcast.mp3) |
Examples:
feedlist-format "%4i %n %11u %t" articlelist-format "%4i %f %D %?T?|%-17T| ?%t" notify-format "%d new articles (%n unread articles, %f unread feeds)" podlist-format "%4i [%-5p %%] %-12S %F"
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Filename part of the download URL. May be empty. May include a query string |
|
Name of the podcast feed |
|
Name of the podcast feed. Contains the original feed’s name, even when selected through a query feed |
|
Name of the podcast feed’s hostname |
|
Title of the podcast episode |
|
Extension of the podcast episode |
|
Publication date of the podcast episode formatted as yyyy-mm-dd |
|
Month when podcast episode was published |
|
Abbreviated month name when podcast episode was published |
|
Day when podcast episode was published |
|
Hour when podcast episode was published |
|
Minute when podcast episode was published |
|
Second when podcast episode was published |
|
Year when podcast episode was published formatted as yy |
|
Year when podcast episode was published formatted as yyyy |
7.10.1. Dialog Titles
You can customize the title format of all available dialogs. Here is a list of dialogs with their respective title format configuration variables, and a list of available formats and their meaning. Please note that the title formats are localized, so if you work on a different locale that is supported by Newsboat, the actually displayed title text may vary unless you customize it.
Dialog | Configuration Variable | Default Value |
---|---|---|
Feed List |
%N %V - %?F?Feeds&Your feeds? (%u unread, %t total)%?F? matching filter `%F'&?%?T? - tag `%T'&? |
|
Article List |
%N %V - Articles in feed '%T' (%u unread, %t total)%?F? matching filter `%F'&? - %U |
|
Search Result |
%N %V - Search results for '%s' (%u unread, %t total)%?F? matching filter `%F'&? |
|
File Browser |
%N %V - %?O?Open File&Save File? - %f |
|
Directory Browser |
%N %V - %?O?Open Directory&Save File? - %f |
|
Help |
%N %V - Help |
|
Select Tag Dialog |
%N %V - Select Tag |
|
Select Filter Dialog |
%N %V - Select Filter |
|
Article View |
%N %V - Article '%T' (%u unread, %t total) |
|
URL View |
%N %V - URLs |
|
Dialog List |
%N %V - Dialogs |
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Name of the program, i.e. "Newsboat" |
|
Program version |
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Currently selected tag (empty if none selected) |
|
Number of total feeds |
|
Number of unread feeds |
|
Number of unread articles |
|
Current filter expression (empty if no filter is active) |
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Feed title |
|
Feed URL |
|
Number of unread articles |
|
Number of total articles |
|
Current filter expression (empty if no filter is active) |
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Search phrase |
|
…Plus all the ones supported by articlelist-title-format (see table above) |
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Current path |
|
Non-empty if file browser is in open mode, empty if in save mode |
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Current path |
|
Non-empty if directory browser is in open mode, empty if in save mode |
Identifier | Meaning |
---|---|
Article title |
|
Feed title |
|
Number of unread articles |
|
Number of total articles |
7.11. Highlighting Text
Newsboat supports the highlighting of text in the feed list, the article list and the article view, using regular expressions to describe patterns to be highlighted. The command syntax goes like this:
highlight <target> <regex> <fgcolor> [<bgcolor> [<attribute> ...]]
Valid values for <target>
are feedlist
, articlelist
, article
and all
.
When specifying all
, the matching will be done in all three views. The
<regex>
must be
a POSIX
extended regular expression, which will be matched case-insensitive against
the text. If multiple highlight matches overlap, the style of the later
specified highlight rule will be applied. <fgcolor>
and <bgcolor>
specify
the foreground color resp. the background color of the matches. You can also
specify 0 or more attributes. You can find a list of valid colors and
attributes in the [_configuring_colors].
Examples for possible highlighting configurations are:
highlight all "newsboat" red highlight article "^(Feed|Title|Author|Link|Date):" default default underline highlight feedlist "https?://[^ ]+" yellow red bold
Note the use of double quotes to preserve spaces in the regular expressions.
7.11.1. Highlighting Articles in the Article List
In addition to generally highlighting text, there is also a specific way to
highlight articles in the article list based on whether they match a certain
filter expression. This means that you can highlight items in the article list
based on their content. This is done using the highlight-article
configuration
command.
The syntax is similar to the highlight
configuration command, with the difference
that there’s no need to specify a target (since it only applies in the article list),
and instead of a regular expression, a filter expression is used. After the filter
expression, the colors and attributes are specified in the same way.
Example:
highlight-article "author =~ \"Andreas Krennmair\"" white red bold
Note the use of double quotes to preserve spaces in the filter expression.
7.11.2. Highlighting Feeds in the Feed List
Similarly, feeds can be highlighted in the feed list based on whether they match
a certain filter expression. This is done using the highlight-feed
configuration command.
Example:
highlight-feed "unread_count > 100" white red bold
Note the use of double quotes to preserve spaces in the filter expression.
7.12. Advanced Dialog Management
Newsboat supports an advanced concept of dialogs. Previously, all dialogs (feed list, article list, article view) were internally laid out as a pure stack. In 2.0, this changed: all dialogs are managed in a list, and the user can jump to another, previously opened dialog from everywhere. This allows a user to open more than one article list, more than one article view, etc., and switch between them without closing them.
The main dialog for this feature can be reached by pressing the "v" key. This opens the list of open dialogs. From there, the user can switch to another dialog by selecting the appropriate entry and pressing "Enter", or can close open dialogs by selecting them and pressing "Ctrl-X".
7.13. Macro Support
Bindings created with bind-key
can only execute a single operation, like
open
or quit
. To execute multiple operations, one has to define a so-called
"macro". To invoke the macro, the user presses the macro prefix ("," by
default) and then the macro’s key. It’s easier to explain with some examples:
macro k open; reload; quit -- "enter feed to reload it" macro o open-in-browser; toggle-article-read "read"
Here, we define two macros. Now when the user types ",k", Newsboat will enter the current feed, reload it, and go back to the feedlist. If the user types ",o", Newsboat will open current article in the external browser, and also mark it read. Note that macros can have a description which will be displayed in the help dialog when the user presses "?".
Macros can invoke any of Newsboat’s operations. Keep
in mind that some operations only make sense in certain situations, e.g.
reload
doesn’t make sense while viewing an article. If you try to execute an
operation that is not supported by the current dialog, it will be ignored.
The macro prefix can be changed from the default "," to another key, e.g. "+" (if you don’t unbind the default "," you’re left with two macro prefixes):
bind-key + macro-prefix unbind-key ,
7.14. Open Links with External Commands
7.14.1. Using Browser
The first step to open links outside of Newsboat is to set a default
browser
in your config file. It can be any command that you would
normally run, such as a web browser or an executable script. For example:
browser firefox
The browser command also takes an optional %u
to specify at which point the
URL should be expanded, %t
specifying where the type of the URL should be
expanded, %T
for the title of the feed/article, and %F
specifying where
the URL of the feed’s website (or the URL of the feed itself if not available)
should be expanded. All parameters will be enclosed in single quotes, making it
unnecessary to quote them yourself. If none of the parameters are used, the URL
will be appended at the end of the command. Therefore, the previous example is equivalent to:
browser "firefox %u"
The following table shows the available link types for %t
:
Type | Meaning |
---|---|
feed |
URL of the feed’s website |
rssfeed |
URL of the feed |
article |
URL of the article |
link |
A URL in an article |
image |
An image in an article |
embed_flash |
A flash embed in an article |
iframe |
An iframe in an article |
video |
A video in an article |
audio |
Audio in an article |
unknown (bug) |
An unknown link type, should not appear |
To open any link with your browser, the versatile
open-in-browser
operation can be used. Its behavior is
specific to each dialog.
The default keybinding for open-in-browser
is "o". An alternative operation,
open-in-browser-and-mark-read
also marks the
article as read when in the article list, but doesn’t work in the feed list.
The default keybinding is "O".
Articles usually contain links which point to different resources and websites. Newsboat detects those links and creates a list which can be seen at the bottom of the article view. To easily scroll through the list and choose a link to open, one can go to the URL view with the "u" key.
Those links can also be opened directly from the article view.
Relevant operations are one
to zero
(digits written as words) and goto-url
.
Keys "1" to "0" can be used to open URL 1 to 10. To open URLs above 10,
start with the "#" key, then type the URL’s number, and press "Enter". To use
goto-url inside a macro, simply append the URL’s number (e.g. goto-url 11
).
7.14.2. Switching Browser for Different Tasks
To manually change the browser from Newsboat internal command line, type
:set browser
followed by the command, and press "Enter".
The variable is only set temporarily (useful for testing), so next
time Newsboat is launched, browser
will reset to the command specified in your
config file:
:set browser chromium
It is also possible to modify configuration variables within macros. For example, one can temporarily modify the browser command to do something else, such as running an image viewer from the URL view:
macro i set browser feh; open-in-browser; set browser elinks
7.14.3. Separating Browser from Newsboat
The default behavior of Newsboat when running external commands is to use the same terminal for the new application. It is great for a "classical" workflow i.e., when working from a virtual console without a graphical environment. On the other hand, it might seem like a limitation if you would like to keep using Newsboat while the command is running. A few simple tricks can be used to work with both Newsboat and an external application at the same time. Those are explained below.
Applications like firefox
, if already running, will simply open a new tab
when receiving a link, then give control back to Newsboat. Because of that,
Newsboat will be unavailable for a split second, then work can resume.
Other applications without this kind of feature will usually do two things:
print messages and warnings (or in the case of interactive console applications,
overwrite Newsboat interface with their own), while also blocking user input
(which prevents controlling Newsboat). To demonstrate this behavior,
the single-tabbed surf
browser is used:
:set browser surf
To prevent applications from printing messages and warnings over Newsboat
interface (useful mostly for GUI apps), you may need to "redirect standard
output and error" to the null
device:
:set browser "surf %u >/dev/null 2>&1"
At this point, if you try to open a link, you are back to the original terminal
from which Newsboat was initially launched, but input is still blocked.
By adding the &
character to the very end of the browser command, the
application will run separately from Newsboat, which can then be used
(and even closed) independently of the app:
:set browser "surf %u >/dev/null 2>&1 &"
This can be simplified by using Newsboat’s open-in-browser-noninteractively
operation. The operation runs the browser while keeping Newsboat’s view on the
foreground. It does not show any of the browser’s stdout
and stderr
output.
:set browser "surf %u &" :exec open-in-browser-noninteractively
This can also be useful if you want to run a download script in the background. For example:
macro d set browser "youtube-dl %u &"; open-in-browser-noninteractively; set browser elinks
For text-based console applications, it is best to first launch a terminal
emulator, which will in turn execute the remainder of the browser command.
Standard output do not need to be silenced with this technique.
Here, alacritty
is used. Of course, you can replace it with your go-to
terminal emulator, just remember to set the "command" or "execute" option
(-e
in this example). To open lynx
in a dedicated terminal:
:set browser "alacritty -e lynx %u &"
Once an application is properly detached, other apps can be launched from the same instance of Newsboat. Each time, you can decide to either keep the same browser, or change it to serve a different purpose.
7.15. Podcast Support
A podcast is a media file distributed over the internet using syndication feeds such as RSS, for later playback on portable players or computers. Newsboat supports downloading, saving and streaming podcasts, though an external media player is needed for playback. This support differs a bit from other podcast aggregators or "podcatchers" in how it is done.
Podcast content is transported in RSS feeds via special tags called "enclosures". Newsboat recognizes these enclosures and stores the relevant information for every podcast item it finds in an RSS feed. Since version 2.0, it also recognizes and handles the Yahoo Media RSS extensions.
Remote APIs don’t always list those "enclosures", so podcasts might be missing from Newsboat. Such APIs are marked in the relevant section of our docs. If a note is missing but you still don’t see enclosures in Newsboat, please file an issue and we’ll get to the bottom of it!
The following sections present two different ways to handle podcasts with Newsboat.
7.15.1. Managing Audio Files with Podboat
What the user can do is to add the podcast download URL to a download queue. Alternatively, Newsboat can be configured to automatically do that. This queue is stored in the queue file next to the cache.db file.
The user can then use the download manager podboat
to download these files
to a directory on the local filesystem. Podboat comes with the Newsboat
package, and features a look and feel very close to the one of Newsboat. It
also shares the same configuration file.
Podcasts that have been downloaded but haven’t been played yet remain in the queue but are marked as downloaded. You can remove them by purging them from the queue with the Shift+P key. After you’ve played a file and close Podboat, it will be removed from the queue. The downloaded file remains on the filesystem unless "delete-played-files" is enabled.
A common "use case" is to configure Newsboat to automatically enqueue newly found podcast download URLs. Then, the user reloads the podcast RSS feeds in Newsboat, and after that, uses Podboat to view the current queue, and either selectively download certain files or automatically download them all together by pressing A within Podboat.
A macro can also be used to enqueue any of the URLs from the URLs view to Podboat’s download queue:
macro E set browser "echo %u >> ~/.newsboat/queue"; open-in-browser; set browser elinks
7.15.2. Streaming Audio Content with a Media Player
As an alternative to Podboat file management, media players such as mpv
can
stream content directly when given a URL. Since Newsboat always assign the
enclosure link to URL 1, the operation one
can be used to open the audio file
(beware that this operation will always open URL 1, even if no enclosure is
found). To listen to your podcast from the article view, a basic macro would be:
macro 1 set browser mpv; one; set browser firefox
For media players with a graphical user interface like vlc
, console output
will typically need to be silenced with >/dev/null 2>&1
. Also, the &
character at the end of the browser command will detach the media player from
Newsboat. You can then read your articles while listening to podcasts:
macro v set browser "vlc %u >/dev/null 2>&1 &"; one; set browser firefox
With mpv, the podcast cover art is fetched automatically when using the
pseudo-gui. The --
near the end will prevent mpv from interpreting the following
arguments as options:
macro p set browser "mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui -- %u &"; one; set browser firefox
To use mpv’s console interface instead, first launch a terminal emulator which will in turn execute mpv. This way, Newsboat and the media player can both be controlled with text-based interfaces, side by side:
macro c set browser "alacritty -e mpv --vid=no -- %u &"; one; set browser firefox
If you are working without a graphical environment (e.g. from a virtual
console), you want to make sure the media player doesn’t try to launch a
graphical user interface. With mpv, the --vid=no
option can be used for this
purpose:
macro n set browser "mpv --vid=no --"; one; set browser lynx
Another use case for this macro would be when running Newsboat on a remote host, while logged in through a secure shell (e.g. OpenSSH). With this setup, Newsboat will effectively serve as the controller to an ad hoc "remote media server". Audio will be playing on the remote host.
7.16. Running multiple copies of Newsboat simultaneously
During development and testing, you might want to run a second copy of Newsboat, operating with different config, URLs list or cache file. This can be achieved by creative use of XDG environment variables. This approach is not beautiful, but it works.
First of all, you will need to create a directory to store the data. Let’s call it test:
$ mkdir -p test/newsboat
Note that we also create a subdirectory called newsboat; this is required to satisfy XDG specification. ATTENTION: if this subdirectory is absent, Newsboat will attempt to run on your live data!
You can now create config and urls files inside test/newsboat; you can also copy cache.db if you don’t want to start with a fresh one.
When the files are ready, you can invoke Newsboat as follows:
$ XDG_CONFIG_HOME=test XDG_DATA_HOME=test newsboat
(This will look newsboat binary up in your PATH; if you’ve just built your own, use ./newsboat instead, or provide a full path.)
By modifying the environment in which Newsboat runs you also modify environments of all the programs that Newsboat starts; that includes filters and external HTML renderers. If they rely on XDG_* variables, they will look for things in test directory and might fail.
For filters, you should either copy the files they need to test, or invoke them in such a way that they don’t look in XDG directories at all.
For renderers, you can work around the issue by undoing the modifications to environment, e.g.:
html-renderer "XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.config XDG_DATA_HOME=$HOME/.data w3c"
As already said: not beautiful, but gets the job done.
7.17. Using SQLite Triggers with Newsboat
This section was written by Elrond, originally for Newsbeuter.
SQLite, the db used by Newsboat, supports triggers. These are small snippets of SQL that get executed inside the database by the database engine. They’re stored inside the db and the normal user (including Newsboat itself) doesn’t see them. Just the db seems to do some magic: Like changing some values when you change another value.
So what is this good for when looking at Newsboat? Well, first off, it’s a hack. The real answer should be to use application logic (do it inside Newsboat, not in the db). So: Don’t use this, unless you know, what you’re doing, and unless you have some sort of backup.
7.17.1. Example
So after the "don’t use it" you still want to know, what one can do? So here’s an example.
Suppose you have a strange feed where the articles become "new" by just changing their subject, and nothing else changes. The body is just empty, and the URL keeps the same. This feed really exists. It’s the "updated software rss feed" of some major company and the title just contains the name of the driver and version number. And the URL points to the download page. Newsboat considers articles only as new, when they have a new UniqueID (this is good). So those articles are never marked as new (unread) ever again.
So what can we do? We do some magic: We let the db test if Newsboat changes the subject and then let itself mark the article again as unread.
-
You need the
sqlite3
command line tool (available viaapt-get install sqlite3
on Debian) or some other tool to do direct sql on the sqlite database. -
Start
sqlite3
with the Newsboat db:Rivendell:~/.newsboat% sqlite3 cache.db SQLite version 3.4.2 Enter ".help" for instructions sqlite>
-
Create the trigger:
sqlite> create trigger update_item_title update of title on rss_item > for each row when old.title != new.title > begin > update rss_item set unread = 1 where rowid == new.rowid; > end;
-
Leave
sqlite3
with "Ctrl-D" or.quit
.
That’s it. Newsboat (well, its db) now marks articles as unread when their title changes. And nicely enough this works all inside Newsboat, no need to restart it so that it rereads the cache, that magically modifies itself. It just works.
7.18. Environment variables
BROWSER
-
Tells Newsboat what browser to use if there is no
browser
setting in the config file. If this variable doesn’t exist, a default oflynx(1)
will be used. CURL_CA_BUNDLE
-
Tells Newsboat to use the specified certificate file to verify the peer. The file may contain multiple certificates. The certificate(s) must be in PEM format.
This option is useful if your libcurl is built without useful certificate information, and you can’t rebuild the library yourself.
EDITOR
-
Tells Newsboat what fallback editor to use when editing the urls file via the
edit-urls
operation and noVISUAL
environment variable is set. If this variable doesn’t exist either, a default ofvi(1)
will be used. NO_PROXY
-
Tells Newsboat to ignore
proxy
setting for certain sites.This variable contains a comma-separated list of hostnames, domain names, and IP addresses.
Domain names match subdomains, i.e. "example.com" also matches "foo.example.com". Domain names that start with a dot only match subdomains, e.g. ".example.com" matches "bar.example.com" but not "example.com" itself.
IPv6 addresses are written without square brackets, and are matched as strings. Thus "::1" doesn’t match "::0:1" even though this is the same address.
PAGER
-
Tells Newsboat what pager to use if the
pager
setting in the config file is explicitly set to an empty string. TMPDIR
-
Tells Newsboat to use the specified directory for storing temporary files. If this variable doesn’t exist, a default of /tmp will be used.
VISUAL
-
Tells Newsboat what editor to use when editing the urls file via the
edit-urls
operation. If this variable doesn’t exist, theEDITOR
environment variable will be used. XDG_CONFIG_HOME
-
Tells Newsboat which base directory to use for the configuration files. See also the section on files for more information.
XDG_DATA_HOME
-
Tells Newsboat which base directory to use for the data files. See also the section on files for more information.
8. Feedback and security
Please report security vulnerabilities to security@newsboat.org, encrypting your emails to PGP key 4ED6CD61932B9EBE if at all possible.
Non-security issues and general questions can be discussed on the issue tracker and the mailing list.
You can chat with developers and fellow users on #newsboat at irc.libera.chat (also accessible via webchat and via Matrix). We do not have a channel on Freenode anymore.
Appendix A: Newsboat Configuration Commands
If set to yes
, then the description will always be displayed even if e.g. a <content:encoded>
tag has been found.
Specifies one or more feed URLs that should always be downloaded, regardless of their Last-Modified timestamp and ETag header. This option can be specified multiple times.
The <sortfield> specifies which article property shall be used for sorting. Currently available are: date
, title
, flags
, author
, link
, guid
, and random
. The optional <direction> can be either asc
for ascending order, or desc
for descending order. Note that direction does not affect the random
sorting. For date
, desc
order is the default, i.e. date
is the same as date-desc
; for all others, asc
is the default. Also, the directions for date
are reversed: desc
means the newest items are first, whereas asc
means the oldest items are first. These inconsistencies will be fixed in a future major version of Newsboat.
This variable defines the format of entries in the article list. See the respective section in the documentation for more information on format strings.
Format of the title in article list. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
If set to yes
, all feeds will be automatically reloaded at start up and then continuously after a certain time has passed (see reload-time
). See also refresh-on-startup
to only reload the feeds at start up, but not continuously. Enabling suppress-first-reload
omits the reload on start up.
Bind key <key> to <operation>. This means that whenever <key> is pressed, then <operation> is executed (if applicable in the current dialog). For more information see Key Bindings. See also unbind-key
to remove a key binding.
If set to yes
, the configured bookmark command is executed without any further input asked from user, unless the url or the title cannot be found/guessed.
If set, then <command> will be used as bookmarking plugin. See the documentation on bookmarking for further information.
If set to yes
, then the configured bookmark command is an interactive program.
Set the browser command to use when opening an article in the browser. If the BROWSER
environment variable is set, it will be used as the default browser, otherwise lynx will be used. For more information, see Using Browser.
This configuration option sets the cache file. This is especially useful if the filesystem of your home directory doesn’t support proper locking (e.g. NFS).
If set to yes
, then the cache gets locked and superfluous feeds and items are removed, such as feeds that can’t be found in the urls configuration file anymore. Run newsboat --cleanup
to do this manually. If you encounter a warning about unreachable feeds having been found, you may see the feed urls listed by creating a log file via the error-log
option.
Set the foreground color, background color and optional attributes for a certain element.
If set to yes
, then Newsboat will ask for confirmation whether the user wants to delete all articles.
If set to yes
, then Newsboat will ask for confirmation whether the user really wants to quit Newsboat.
If set to yes
, then Newsboat will ask for confirmation whether the user wants to mark all feeds as read.
If set to yes
, then Newsboat will ask for confirmation on whether the user wants to mark a feed as read.
Set a cookie cache. If set, cookies will be cached in (i.e. read from and written to) this file, using Netscape format.
This format specifies the date/time format in the article list. For a detailed documentation on most of the allowed formats, consult the manpage of strftime(3). %L is a custom format not available in strftime which lists the days since the article was published (e.g. "2 days ago").
With this command, you can predefine filters, which you can later select from a list, and which are then applied after selection. This is especially useful for filters that you need often and you don’t want to enter them every time you need them.
If set to yes
, all read articles will be deleted when quiting Newsboat. This option only applies if cleanup-on-quit
is set to yes
or if the --cleanup
argument is passed.
Format of the title in dialog list. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
Format of the title in directory browser. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
If set to yes
, then a read progress (in percent) is displayed in the article view. Otherwise, no read progress is displayed.
If set to yes
, then for all feed items with no content but with a link, the link is downloaded and the result used as content instead. This may significantly increase the download times of "empty" feeds.
How many times Newsboat shall try to successfully download a feed before giving up. This is an option to improve the success of downloads on slow and shaky connections such as via a TOR proxy.
The number of seconds Newsboat shall wait when downloading a feed before giving up. This is an option to improve the success of downloads on slow and shaky connections such as via a TOR proxy.
If set, then user errors (e.g. errors regarding defunct RSS feeds) will be logged to this file.
If set, then show-urls
will pipe the current article to a specific external tool instead of using the internal URL viewer. This can be used to integrate tools such as urlview.
The <sortfield> specifies which feed property shall be used for sorting; currently available are: firsttag
, title
, articlecount
, unreadarticlecount
, lastupdated
and none
. The optional <direction> specifies the sort direction. asc
specifies ascending sorting, desc
specifies descending sorting. desc
is the default.
If set and FeedHQ support is used, then all articles that are flagged with the specified flag are being "shared" in FeedHQ so that people that follow you can see it.
If set and FeedHQ support is used, then all articles that are flagged with the specified flag are being "starred" in FeedHQ and appear in the list of "Starred items".
This variable sets your FeedHQ login for FeedHQ support.
This variable sets the number of articles that are loaded from FeedHQ per feed.
This variable sets your FeedHQ password for FeedHQ support. Double quotes and backslashes within it should be escaped.
A more secure alternative to the above, is providing your password from an external command that is evaluated during login. This can be used to read your password from a gpg encrypted file or your system keyring.
Another alternative, by storing your plaintext password elsewhere in your system.
If set and FeedHQ support is used, then "special feeds" like "People you follow" (articles shared by people you follow), "Starred items" (your starred articles) and "Shared items" (your shared articles) appear in your subscription list.
Configures the URL where your FeedHQ instance resides.
This variable defines the format of entries in the feed list. See the respective section in the documentation for more information on format strings.
Format of the title in feed list. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
Format of the title in file browser. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
If set and FreshRSS support is used, then all articles that are flagged with the specified flag are being "starred" in FreshRSS and appear in the list of "Starred items".
This variable sets your FreshRSS login for FreshRSS support.
This variable sets the number of articles that are loaded from FreshRSS per feed.
This variable sets your FreshRSS password for FreshRSS support. Double quotes and backslashes within it should be escaped.
A more secure alternative to the above, is providing your password from an external command that is evaluated during login. This can be used to read your password from a gpg encrypted file or your system keyring.
Another alternative, by storing your plaintext password elsewhere in your system.
If set and FreshRSS support is used, then a "Starred items" feed (containing your starred/favourited articles) appears in your subscription list.
Configures the URL for the Google Reader API endpoint of your FreshRSS instance.
If set to yes
, then the first unread article will be selected whenever a feed is entered.
If set to yes
, then the next-unread, prev-unread and random-unread keys will search in other feeds for unread articles if all articles in the current feed are read. If set to no
, then these keys will stop in the current feed.
Format of the title in help window. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
With this command, you can highlight text parts in the feed list, the article list and the article view.
With this command, you can highlight articles in the article list if they match a filter expression.
With this command, you can highlight feeds in the feed list if they match a filter expression.
Defines the maximum number of entries of commandline resp. search history to be saved. To disable history saving, set it to 0.
If set to internal
, then the internal HTML renderer will be used. Otherwise, the specified command will be executed, the HTML to be rendered will be written to the command’s stdin, and the program’s output will be displayed. This makes it possible to use other, external programs, such as w3m, links or lynx, to render HTML.
Set HTTP authentication method. Allowed values: any
, basic
, digest
, digest_ie
(only available with libcurl 7.19.3 and newer), gssnegotiate
, ntlm
and anysafe
.
If a downloaded article from <feed> matches <filterexpr>, then it is ignored and not presented to the user. This command is further explained in the "kill file" section below.
This configuration option defines in what way an article is ignored (see ignore-article
). If set to download
, then it is ignored in the download/parsing phase and thus never written to the cache, if it set to display
, it is ignored when displaying articles but is kept in the cache.
With this command, you can include other files to be interpreted as configuration files. This is especially useful to separate your configuration into several files, e.g. key configuration, color configuration, …
Unique application ID issued by Inoreader. See "Inoreader" section.
Application key issued by Inoreader. See "Inoreader" section.
If set and Inoreader support is used, then all articles that are flagged with the specified flag are being "shared" in Inoreader so that people that follow you can see it.
If set and Inoreader support is used, then all articles that are flagged with the specified flag are being "starred" in Inoreader and appear in the list of "Starred items".
This variable sets your Inoreader login for Inoreader support.
This variable sets the number of articles that are loaded from Inoreader per feed.
This variable sets your Inoreader password for Inoreader support. Double quotes and backslashes within it should be escaped.
A more secure alternative to the above, is providing your password from an external command that is evaluated during login. This can be used to read your password from a gpg encrypted file or your system keyring.
Another alternative, by storing your plaintext password elsewhere in your system.
If set and Inoreader support is used, then "special feeds" like "Starred items" (your starred articles) and "Shared items" (your shared articles) appear in your subscription list.
Format of the title in article view. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
If set to a number greater than 0, only articles that were published within the last <number> days are kept, and older articles are deleted. If set to 0, this option is not active. Note that changing this setting won’t bring back the articles that were deleted earlier; currently, there’s no non-hacky way to bring back deleted articles.
With this command, you can define a macro key and specify a list of commands that shall be executed when the macro prefix and the macro key are pressed. Optionally, a description can be added. If present, the description is shown in the help form.
If set to yes
, then all articles that get selected in the article list are marked as read.
Set the maximum number of articles to open in a browser when using the open-all-unread-in-browser
or open-all-unread-in-browser-and-mark-read
commands.
If set to a number greater than 0, the download speed per download is set to that limit (in KB/s).
Set the number of articles to maximally keep per feed. If the number is set to 0, then all articles are kept.
Sets the username for use with Miniflux.
This variable sets the number of articles that are loaded from Miniflux per feed.
Configures the password for use with Miniflux. Double quotes and backslashes within it should be escaped.
A more secure alternative to the above, is providing your password from an external command that is evaluated during login. This can be used to read your password from a gpg encrypted file or your system keyring.
Another alternative, by storing your plaintext password elsewhere in your system.
Sets the API Token for use with Miniflux.
A more secure alternative to the above, is providing your API token from an external command that is evaluated during login. This can be used to read your token from a gpg encrypted file or your system keyring.
Another alternative, by storing your plaintext token elsewhere in your system.
Configures the URL where the Miniflux installation you want to use resides.
This variable sets your NewsBlur login for NewsBlur support.
This variable sets the number of articles that are loaded from NewsBlur per feed.
This variable sets your NewsBlur password for NewsBlur support. Double quotes and backslashes within it should be escaped.
A more secure alternative to the above, is providing your password from an external command that is evaluated during login. This can be used to read your password from a gpg encrypted file or your system keyring.
Another alternative, by storing your plaintext password elsewhere in your system.
Configures the URL where the NewsBlur instance resides.
If set to no
, notifications will only be made when there are new feeds or articles. If set to yes
, notifications will be made regardless.
If set to yes
, then the speaker will beep on new articles.
Format string that is used for formatting notifications.
If set, then the configured program will be executed if new articles arrived (through a reload) or if notify-always
is yes
. The first parameter of the called program contains the notification message. In order to pass other hard-coded arguments to the program, write an appropriate wrapper shell script and use it as <command> instead.
If set to yes
, then a "privacy message" will be sent to the terminal, containing a notification message about new articles. This is especially useful if you use terminal emulations such as GNU screen which implement privacy messages.
If set to yes
, then the xterm window title will be set to a notification message about new articles.
If set and ownCloud News support is used, then all articles that are flagged with the specified flag are being "starred" in ownCloud News.
Sets the username to use with the ownCloud instance.
Configures the password to use with the ownCloud instance. Double quotes and backslashes within it should be escaped.
A more secure alternative to the above, is providing your password from an external command that is evaluated during login. This can be used to read your password from a gpg encrypted file or your system keyring.
Another alternative, by storing your plaintext password elsewhere in your system.
Configures the URL where the ownCloud instance resides.
If set and The Old Reader support is used, then all articles that are flagged with the specified flag are being "shared" in The Old Reader so that people that follow you can see it.
If set and The Old Reader support is used, then all articles that are flagged with the specified flag are being "starred" in The Old Reader and appear in the list of "Starred items".
This variable sets your The Old Reader login for The Older Reader support.
This variable sets the number of articles that are loaded from The Old Reader per feed.
This variable sets your The Old Reader password for The Old Reader support. Double quotes and backslashes within it should be escaped.
A more secure alternative to the above, is providing your password from an external command that is evaluated during login. This can be used to read your password from a gpg encrypted file or your system keyring.
Another alternative, by storing your plaintext password elsewhere in your system.
If set and The Old reader support is used, then "special feeds" like "People you follow" (articles shared by people you follow), "Starred items" (your starred articles) and "Shared items" (your shared articles) appear in your subscription list.
If set to yes
, jump to the next unread item when an item is opened in the browser and marked as read.
If the OPML online subscription mode is enabled, then the list of feeds will be taken from the OPML file found on this location. Optionally, you can specify more than one URL. All the listed OPML URLs will then be taken into account when loading the feed list.
If set to internal
, then the internal pager will be used. Otherwise, the article to be displayed will be rendered to be a temporary file and then displayed with the configured pager. If the command is set to an empty string, the content of the PAGER
environment variable will be used. If the command contains a placeholder %f
, it will be replaced with the temporary filename.
If set to yes
, then all podcast URLs that are found in articles are added to the podcast download queue. See the respective section in the documentation for more information on podcast support in Newsboat.
If set to yes
, then all query feeds are prepopulated with articles on startup.
Set the proxy to use for downloading RSS feeds. (Don’t forget to actually enable the proxy with use-proxy yes
.) Note that the NO_PROXY
environment variable can disable the proxy for certain sites.
Set the proxy authentication string.
Set proxy authentication method. Allowed values: any
, basic
, digest
, digest_ie
(only available with libcurl 7.19.3 and newer), gssnegotiate
, ntlm
and anysafe
.
Set proxy type. Allowed values: http
, socks4
, socks4a
, socks5
and socks5h
.
If set to yes
, then all feeds will be reloaded when Newsboat starts up. This is equivalent to the -r
commandline option. See also auto-reload
to additionally reload the feeds continuously.
If set to yes
, then manually reloading all feeds will only reload the currently visible feeds, e.g. if a filter or a tag is set.
The number of parallel reload threads that shall be started when all feeds are reloaded.
The number of minutes between automatic reloads.
Specifies one or more feed URLs for whose articles the unread flag will be reset if an article has been updated, i.e. its content has been changed. This is especially useful for RSS feeds where single articles are updated after publication, and you want to be notified of the updates. This option can be specified multiple times.
If set to no
, Newsboat will not limit saved article filenames to ASCII characters.
Specifies one or more Newsboat operations, separated by semicolons, which are executed on Newsboat startup.
The default path where articles shall be saved to. If an invalid path is specified, the current directory is used.
Keep the configured number of lines above and below the selected item in lists. Configure a high number to keep the selected item in the center of the screen.
This configuration command specifies the highlighting colors when searching for text from the article view.
Format of the title in search result. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
Format of the title in filter selection dialog. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
Format of the lines in "Select tag" dialog. See the respective section in the documentation for more information on format strings.
Format of the title in tag selection dialog. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
If set to no
, then the keymap hints will not be displayed. (The keymap hints are usually at the bottom of the screen, but see swap-title-and-hints
setting.)
If set to yes
, then all articles of a feed are listed in the article list. If set to no
, then only unread articles are listed.
If set to yes
, then all feeds, including those without unread articles, are listed. If set to no
, then only feeds with one or more unread articles are list.
If set to no
, then the title bar will not be displayed. (The title bar is usually at the top of the screen, but see swap-title-and-hints
setting.)
If set to no
, skip verification of the certificate’s name against host.
If set to no
, skip verification of the peer’s SSL certificate.
If set to yes
, then the first automatic reload will be suppressed if auto-reload
is set to yes
.
If set to yes
, then the title (which is usually at the top of the screen) and the keymap hints (usually at the bottom) will exchange places. These bars can be hidden entirely, via the show-keymap-hints
and show-title-bar
settings.
If set to a number greater than 0, all HTML will be rendered to this maximum line length or the terminal width (whichever is smaller). If set to 0, the terminal width will always be used in the article view, while pipe-to
, save
, and save-all
will wrap at 80 columns instead. Does not apply when using external renderer or viewing the source. Also note that "Link" header and "Links" section won’t be affected by it—they contain URLs which are better not wrapped.
If set to yes
, jump to the next unread item when an item’s read status is toggled in the article list.
If set and Tiny Tiny RSS support is used, then all articles that are flagged with the specified flag are being marked as "published" in Tiny Tiny RSS.
If set and Tiny Tiny RSS support is used, then all articles that are flagged with the specified flag are being "starred" in Tiny Tiny RSS.
Sets the username for use with Tiny Tiny RSS.
Configures the mode in which Tiny Tiny RSS is used. In single-user mode, login and password are used for HTTP authentication, while in multi-user mode, they are used for authenticating with Tiny Tiny RSS.
Configures the password for use with Tiny Tiny RSS. Double quotes and backslashes within it should be escaped.
A more secure alternative to the above, is providing your password from an external command that is evaluated during login. This can be used to read your password from a gpg encrypted file or your system keyring.
Another alternative, by storing your plaintext password elsewhere in your system.
Configures the URL where the Tiny Tiny RSS installation you want to use resides.
Unbind key <key>. This means that no operation is called when <key> is pressed. If you provide "-a" as <key>, all currently bound keys will become unbound. Optionally, you can specify a dialog (for a list of available dialogs, see bind-key
above). If you specify one, the key binding will only be unbound for the specified dialog.
This configuration command sets the source where URLs shall be retrieved from. By default, this is the urls file. Alternatively, you can set it to opml
, which enables Newsboat’s OPML online subscription mode, to ttrss
which enables Newsboat’s Tiny Tiny RSS support, to oldreader
, which enables Newsboat’s The Old Reader support, to newsblur
, which enables NewsBlur support, to feedhq
for FeedHQ support, to freshrss
for FreshRSS support, to ocnews
for ownCloud News support, to inoreader
for Inoreader support, or to miniflux
for Miniflux support. Query feed specifications will be read from the local urls file regardless of this setting.
Format of the title in URL view. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
If set to yes
, then the configured proxy will be used for downloading the RSS feeds.
If set to a non-zero-length string, this value will be used as HTTP User-Agent header for all HTTP requests.
If set to yes
, moving down while on the last item in a list will wrap around to the top and vice versa.
Appendix B: Newsboat Operations
Open the currently selected feed or article.
Quit the program or return to the previous dialog (depending on the context).
Quit the program without confirmation.
Reload the currently selected feed.
Reload all feeds.
Mark all articles in the currently selected feed read.
Mark articles in all feeds read.
Mark all above as read.
Export the currently selected article to a plain text file, word-wrapped according to the text-width
setting.
Export all articles from the currently selected feed to plain text files, word-wrapped according to the text-width
setting.
Jump to the next unread article.
Jump to the previous unread article.
Jump to next list entry.
Jump to previous list entry.
Jump to a random unread article.
Use browser to open the URL associated with the current article, feed, or entry in the URL view.
Use browser to open the URL associated with the current article, feed, or entry in the URL view. This operation works similar to open-in-browser
, but the output of the browser (stdout and stderr) is not shown, and the browser doesn’t receive keyboard input. You would probably add &
at the end of the browser
command to put it into background, too.
Use browser to open the URL associated with the current article, or entry in the URL view. When used in the article list, it will also mark the article as read.
Open all the unread URLs in the current feed.
Open all the unread URLs in the current feed and mark them as read.
Run the help screen.
Toggle between the HTML view and the source view in the article view.
Toggle the read flag for the currently selected article, and clear the delete flag if set.
Toggle whether read feeds should be shown in the feed list.
Show all URLs in the article in a list (similar to urlview).
Clear current tag.
Select tag.
Open the search dialog. When a search is done in the article list, then the search operation only applies to the articles of the current feed, otherwise to all articles.
Open the URL dialog and then open a specified URL in the browser.
Open URL 1 in the browser.
Open URL 2 in the browser.
Open URL 3 in the browser.
Open URL 4 in the browser.
Open URL 5 in the browser.
Open URL 6 in the browser.
Open URL 7 in the browser.
Open URL 8 in the browser.
Open URL 9 in the browser.
Open URL 10 in the browser.
Add the podcast download URL of the current article (if any is found) to the podcast download queue (see the respective section in the documentation for more information on podcast support).
Edit the list of subscribed URLs. Newsboat will start the editor configured through the VISUAL
environment variable (if unset, EDITOR
is used; fallback: vi
). When editing is finished, Newsboat will reload the URLs file.
Reload the URLs configuration file.
Redraw the screen.
Open the command line.
Set a filter.
Select a predefined filter.
Clear currently set filter.
Bookmark currently selected article or URL.
Edit the flags of the currently selected article.
Go to the next feed with unread articles. This only works from the article list.
Go to the previous feed with unread articles. This only works from the article list.
Go to the next feed. This only works from the article list.
Go to the previous feed. This only works from the article list.
Delete the currently selected article.
Delete all articles in the articlelist. Note that the articlelist might contain a subset of feed’s articles (because of filters or show-read-articles no
), or it might contain a mix of articles from different feeds (if you’re viewing a query feed) — in either case, delete-all-articles
affects just those articles, not all articles of the respective feed(s).
Purge all articles that are marked as deleted from the article list.
View list of open dialogs.
Close currently selected dialog.
Go to next dialog.
Go to previous dialog.
Pipe article to command. The text will be word-wrapped according to the text-width
setting.
Sort feeds/articles by interactively choosing the sort method.
Sort feeds/articles by interactively choosing the sort method (reversed).
Go up one item in the list.
Go down one item in the list.
Go up one page in the list.
Go down one page in the list.
Go to the first item in the list.
Go to the last item in the list.
Initiate macro execution. The next key press selects the actual macro and runs it.
Switch focus between widgets. This is currently only applicable to the filebrowser
and dirbrowser
contexts.
Go to item whose title contains the specified string (case-insensitive).
Return to previous search results (if any). This only works from searchresultslist
.
Go to the feed of the currently selected article.
Appendix C: Podboat Configuration Commands
If set to yes
, Podboat will delete files when their corresponding queue entry is removed (this includes "finished" and "deleted" entries as well).
Specifies the directory where Podboat shall download the files to. Optionally, placeholders can be used to place downloads in a directory structure. See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats. This setting is applied at enqueueing time; changing it won’t affect download paths of the podcasts that were already added to the queue.
Specifies how Podboat would name the files it downloads (see also download-path
). See "Format Strings" section of Newsboat manual for details on available formats.
Specifies the maximum number of parallel downloads when automatic download is enabled.
Specifies the player that shall be used for playback of downloaded files.
This variable defines the format of entries in Podboat’s download list. See the respective section in the documentation for more information on format strings.
Appendix D: Podboat Operations
Operation | Default key | Description |
---|---|---|
Q |
Quit the program. |
|
Shift+Q |
Quit the program without confirmation. |
|
? |
Show the help screen. |
|
D |
Download the currently selected URL. |
|
C |
Cancel the currently selected download. |
|
P |
Start player with currently selected download. |
|
M |
Mark currently selected entry as finished. |
|
Shift+D |
Delete the currently selected URL from the queue. |
|
Shift+P |
Remove all finished and deleted downloads from the queue and load URLs that were newly added to the queue. |
|
A |
Toggle the "automatic download" feature where all queued URLs are downloaded one after the other. The |
|
+ |
Increase the |
|
- |
Decrease the |
Appendix E: License
MIT License
Copyright 2006-2015 Andreas Krennmair <ak@newsbeuter.org>
Copyright 2015-2024 Alexander Batischev <eual.jp@gmail.com>
Copyright 2006-2017 Newsbeuter contributors
Copyright 2017-2024 Newsboat contributors
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.