Desktop in a shell: newsbeuter

Another week, another post from my desktop in a shell series. This time: newsbeuter, my RSS/Atom/whatever feed-reader of choice. Newsbeuter is a config-and-forget kind of tool. You only have to touch it when you change from a static ~/.newsbeuter/urls to Google Reader or something (like I did some time ago). In the following I will explain both ways (as both are short and it would not fill a whole post then *g*).

newsbeuter with a static urls file

First you create a ~/.newsbeuter/urls with all your feed URLs (one per line). Then you already can start newsbeuter and it will "just work". But you also can customize it (see newsbeuter's online doc) by writing a ~/.newsbeuter/config. Mine was rather short:

 auto-reload yes
 refresh-on-startup yes
 goto-next-feed no

Which means newsbeuter will refresh the feeds every 60 minutes (tuneable via reload-time) and on startup and won't jump to the next feed when pressing n in a feed which has no unread items. Yes, sorry, this is all. Newsbeuter just works ;)

newsbeuter with Google Reader

Want to use newsbeuter with your Google Reader account? Add

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

to your ~/.newsbeuter/config and it works :) Most people want to add googlereader-show-special-feeds no as they do not care about Google's suggestions etc. The only culprit here is than one has to use Google Reader to subscribe to feeds, as newsbeuter does not support this (it's a viewer only). Oh, and here comes the screenshot you waited for: And no, I do not post my config here, you have to copy-paste it from above, hard, isn't it? :)