Sometimes, less is more.

For me, that’s especially the case when I want to avoid distractions.

It is why I sometimes handle my email using mutt.

And write using vim.

And browse the web using links.

And why I sometimes browse the fediverse using toot. (https://github.com/ihabunek/toot)

It is also why, recently, I’ve been using Newsboat for reading my RSS subscriptions.

Newsboat is a TUI - terminal user interface - RSS reader.

It is fast and, frankly, a pleasure to use.

Even better, it is easy to configure to use my RSS aggregator of choice, FreshRSS.

One can also dump individual RSS feeds into it directly, but I prefer to aggregate using FreshRSS, to keep all my readers in sync, and to grab full text content even when feeds only offer partial content.

It is easy enough to install and configure, and it has pretty good documentation, but there were a couple of points to note.

Config file location

By default, Newsboat uses $HOME/.newsboat as the path for its config file.

This is what it will create when you run newsboat for the first time.

I prefer to have it under $HOME/.config/newsboat and, fortunately, it supports that.

You just have to create it yourself, along with the data directory, $HOME/.local/share/newsboat

If you create it there, Newsboat will detect it and use it.

Configuring FreshRSS

The documentation has a section on configuring FreshRSS.

Since, for me, RSS is not that sensitive, I don’t mind using my FreshRSS account’s API password in plaintext in the config file, but YMMV.

It really is as simple as:

urls-source "freshrss"
freshrss-url "https://freshrss.example.com/api/greader.php"
freshrss-login "myusername"
freshrss-password "mypassword"

I also dropped another few settings into the config file:

browser          links
show-read-feeds  yes
auto-reload yes
reload-threads 100

to use links as the default browser, to show feeds that were already ready, to automatically reload feeds and to do so in parallel.

And that’s it.

A few moments to familiarise yourself with the keybindings, and you’re off reading your favourite blogs’ updates in a distraction-free environment.