Read RSS Feeds in the Terminal with Newsbeuter

Productivity Sauce

When it comes to reading and managing RSS feeds in the terminal, Newsbeuter is hard to beat. It's easy to get to grips with, and it offers a handful of powerful features which let you juggle multiple RSS feeds with consummate ease.

Newsbeuter can import existing feeds in the OPML format, so you don't have to start from scratch. The RSS reader features a flexible tagging system which lets you keep tabs on multiple feeds. The search feature lets you search through all downloaded articles, while the killfile functionality is useful for automatically removing unwanted RSS items. In addition to regular RSS feeds, Newsbeuter can handle file podcasts, so you can use the application as a no-frills podcast catcher. Better yet, the latest version of Newsbeuter supports synchronization with Google Reader, a boon if you use the latter as your preferred web-based RSS aggregator. Connecting Newsbeuter to your Google Reader account is easy. Create the ~/.newsbeuter/config file and open it in a text editor. Add then the following configuration to it (replace the sample values with your actual Google Reader account info):

urls-source "googlereader"
googlereader-login "user@gmail.com"
googlereader-password "password"

Newsbeuter supports a wide range of configuration parameters which you can specify in the ~/.newsbeuter/config file. For example, if you want Newsbeuter to hide Google Reader's special feeds, you can do that by specifying the googlereader-show-special-feeds as follows:

googlereader-show-special-feeds no

To make Newsbeuter refresh feeds on launch, add the auto-reload yes option, and use the reload-time option to specify the interval in minutes between refreshes. Check Newsbeuter documentation for further info on configuring the RSS feader.