The Newsbeuter RSS Feedreader

"Newsbeuter" is a pun on the German word "Wildbeuter", which means "hunter-gatherer". During the stone age, people hunted and gathered their food, and these days, they hunt and gather news and information. Credits for this idea goes to Clifford Wolf, who submitted it to a little competiton that was started when I got aware that the original name would violate French and European registered trademarks.

Newsbeuter is available as source package. Simply go to http://synflood.at/newsbeuter.html and download the latest source package, which is usually in the .tar.gz file format. Alternatively, you can check out the latest development source tree from the newsbeuter SVN repository by running the following command on the commandline:

svn co http://bereshit.synflood.at/svn/noos/trunk

Newsbeuter depends on a number of libraries to function correctly. This table lists these dependencies. Please be aware that the list libraries may themselves depend on other libraries. These dependencies are not listed here. Please also be aware that you need a recent C++ compiler. Currently, newsbeuter has only been tested with GCC.

After you've downloaded and installed the dependencies mentioned above, you can start compiling and installing newsbeuter. To compile newsbeuter, simply run "make" in the source tree. After a short time, this should complete successfully, and you can go on with installation by running "make install". By default, this will install the "newsbeuter" binary to the /usr/local/bin directory. You can provide an alternative installation path using the prefix parameter, e.g. running "make install prefix=/opt/newsbeuter" will install the binary to the directory /opt/newsbeuter/bin.

# a comment
max-items        100 # such comments are possible, too
browser          links
show-read-feeds  no

unbind-key       R
bind-key         ^r    reload-all

It is possible to configure custom color settings in newsbeuter. 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:

The "default" color means that the terminal's default color will be used.

Optionally, you can also add one or more attributes. The following attributes are supported:

Currently, the following elements are supported:

The default color configuration of newsbeuter looks like this:

background   white   black
listnormal   white   black
listfocus    yellow  blue   bold
info         yellow  blue   bold
article      white   black

Newsbeuter comes with the possibility to categorize or "tag", as well call it, RSS feeds. Every RSS feed can be assigned 0 or more tags. Within newsbeuter, 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 ~/.newsbeuter/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 ~/.newsbeuter/urls file may look like this:

http://blog.fefe.de/rss.xml?html interesting conspiracy news "cool stuff"
http://rss.orf.at/news.xml news orf
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise.rdf news interesting

When you now start newsbeuter 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 http://blog.fefe.de/rss.xml?html RSS feed. Pressing "^t" clears the current tag, and again shows all RSS feeds, regardless of their assigned tags.

From version 0.4 on, newsbeuter 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 newsbeuter.

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 ~/.newsbeuter/urls file configuration lines like the following ones:

exec:~/bin/execurl-script
filter:~/bin/filter-script:http://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:

"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:

"filter:~/bin/filter-script param1 param2:http://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:http://some.test/url tag3 tag4 tag5

A collection of such extension scripts can be found on this website: http://kiza.kcore.de/software/snownews/snowscripts/extensions

If you want to write your own extensions, refer to this website for further instructions: http://kiza.kcore.de/software/snownews/snowscripts/writing

A podcast is a media file distributed over the internet using syndication feeds such as RSS, for later playback on portable players or computers. Newsbeuter contains support for downloading and saving podcasts. 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". Newsbeuter recognizes these enclosures and stores the relevant information for every podcast item it finds in an RSS feed. What the user then can do is to add the podcast download URL to a download queue. Alternatively, newsbeuter can be configured to automatically do that. This queue is stored in the file $HOME/.newsbeuter/queue.

The user can then use the download manager "podbeuter" to download these files to a directory on the local filesystem. Podbeuter comes with the newsbeuter package, and features a look and feel very close to the one of newsbeuter. It also shares the same configuration file.

A usual "use case" is to configure newsbeuter to automatically enqueue newly found podcast download URLs. Then, the user reloads the podcast RSS feeds in newsbeuter, and after that, he/she uses podbeuter to view the current queue, and either selectively download certain files or automatically download them all together by pressing "a" within podbeuter.