Newsbeuter

Newsbeuter is an open-source and free command-line software engineered to display RSS and Atom feeds in a Linux terminal emulator application. In other words, it is a text-mode feed reader for UNIX-like operating systems, including Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.

Features at a glance

The software is a slick and fast feed reader implemented in C++ and designed to be fully controlled with your keyboard (includes configurable shortcuts), supports Atom and RSS 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0 feeds, lets users to download podcasts, as well as to easily and quickly search through all downloaded articles.

In addition, the Newsbeuter software allows users to effortlessly query and categorize their news subscriptions, thanks to a flexible tag system, integrate data sources, thanks to a flexible plugin and filter system, remove unwanted articles, define meta feeds, and export and import OPML files and Google Reader subscriptions.

Getting started with Newsbeuter

While the Newsbeuter program can be easily installed from the main software repositories of Debian, which is the recommended Linux distribution to run Newsbeuter on, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Slackware, openSUSE, Fedora and PLD Linux, it can also be installed on any other GNU/Linux operating system via its gzipped source archive.

To install it, simply download the TAR archive from Softoware using the dedicated download section above, save the file somewhere on your PC, unpack it, open a terminal emulator app and go to the location of the extracted archive files with ‘cd’ (e.g. cd /home/softoware/newsbeuter-2.8).

Then, you must execute the ‘sh config.sh’ command to configure, and eventually optimize the program for your computer’s architecture/operating system, followed by the ‘make’ command to compile it. Lastly, install the application system wide with the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user.

What is new in this release:

• Add bookmark script for getpocket.com support (Andreas Happe).
• Fix issues with the build process on OpenBSD (Kyle Isom).
• Make guid generation smarter (Jochen Sprickerhof).
• In the feed list, quitting now is the same as clearing the tag in case a tag is selected.
• Add support for The Old Reader (theoldreader.com).
• Add support for NewsBlur (Thomas Weißschuh).
• Fix crash bug in filter expression parsing.
• Update French translation (Sabrina Dubroca).
• Fix crash bug with unbalanced tags (Richard Quirk).

What is new in version 2.4:

• Added support for query feeds in combination with Google Reader support.
• Added ability to configure proxy authentication method.
• Added commandline option -q to enable quiet startup (patch by Isaac Good)
• Re-sort feed list after all feeds have been reloaded.
• Added keys to jump to the next/previous feed or article regardless of its "unread" status (patches by Jim Pryor)
• Implemented on-demand loading of feeds to reduce memory usage.
• Removed Bloglines support as the service shuts down on October 1, 2010.
• Implemented XDG Base Directory support (patch by Elrond)
• Google Reader: when in offline mode, record unread status changes and later replay when in online mode.
• Fixed Google Reader authentication issue with certain passwords (fixes issue #238).
• Added configuration option "cookie-cache" (fixes issue #234).

What is new in version 2.3:

• Subscribe to RSS 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom feeds
• Download podcasts
• Freely configure your keyboard shortcuts
• Search through all downloaded articles
• Categorize and query your subscriptions with a flexible tag system
• Integrate any data source through a flexible filter and plugin system
• Automatically remove unwanted articles through a "killfile"
• Define "meta feeds" using a powerful query language
• Synchronize newsbeuter with your bloglines.com account
• Import and exporting your subscriptions with the widely used OPML format
• Freely define newsbeuter's look'n'feel through free color configurability and format strings
• Keep all your feeds in sync with Google Reader

What is new in version 2.2:

• Added Google Reader support.
• Fixed issues #90, #160, #161, #168, #169, #171, #179, #180, #184.
• Implemented article highlighting in article list based on the article content (fixes issue #174).
• Extended "ignore article" functionality with different ignore modes (download/display; fixes issue #52).
• Added "hard quit" key to immediately quit from newsbeuter (patch by Jim Pryor)
• Added "download status" format specifier for feedlist-format (fixes issue #181).
• Added HTML table renderer (patch by Stefan Erben)
• Fixed issues #183, #188 (patch by Stefan Erben)
• Added "open-in-browser-and-mark-read" key (patch by Isaac Good)

What is new in version 2.0:

• Added more flexible dialog handling
• Improved position handling in article list (fixes #112; thanks to Isaac Good)
• Fixed a lot of bugs (#102, #111, #117, #130, #131).
• Added ability to specify a list of OPML URLs when using OPML as URL source.
• Added config option "keep-articles-days" to optionally keep articles only for a limited number of days.
• Added config option "bookmark-interactive" to indicate that the configured bookmarking command is interactive.
• Don't display authentication information in URLs (fixes #121).
• Replaced mrss with new RSS/Atom parser.
• Added ability to search for text from the article view.
• Added basic support for Yahoo Media RSS.
• Made article view pager configurable.
• Improved HTML rendering of links and underlined and bold text.
• Added ":source" commandline command to (re)load configuration files.
• Implemented "pipe-to" key to pipe articles to external commands.
• Implemented backtick evaluation for configuration files.
• Extended filter language with "between" operator.
• Added "age" attribute for articles to filter them for relative age (in days).
• Extended "set" commandline command to toggle boolean variables and reset configuration variables of all types to their default.
• Added ability to configure local files as feeds.
• Added a "random-unread" key to go to a random unread article.
• When opening articles from a search result dialog, make search phrase stand out in article view.
• Persist commandline and search history.
• Implemented commandline completion.
• Improved help dialog so that it now shows unbound functions.
• Added ability to sort feed list and article list by interactively choosing the sort method.
• Improved and extended conditional HTTP download handling.

What is new in version 1.3:

• The internal architecture has been refactored to improve overall stability.
• Placeholders for download-path are now supported.
• podbeuter now keeps downloads in the list until they've been played.
• New subscriptions can be added directly from newsbeuter.
• Keymaps can now be configured locally for every dialog.
• It's now possible to configure the number of parallel reload threads to enhance the download experience when a user has many feed subscriptions.

What is new in version 1.1:

• Support for wrapping long header lines and links in the article view was added.
• A security issue where opening specially crafted URLs of articles could lead to execution of shell commands was fixed.

Requirements:

• libnXml
• libmRss
• SQLite
• STFL
• libidn