A newsreader or RSS reader is an application that allows you to read “feeds” from various websites. This can really help you stop blindly surfing the web, yet catch up on the latest articles from sites you care about.
Note: See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications.
Newsboat
I’m going with newsboat for this category.
Installation
When looking at the install options, it did not look pretty. From their documentation page, snap packages were mentioned, but I don’t use those with my Linux distro. Newsboat is also not available in my package manager. Their next suggestions was download and compile from source code. That would be a real pain, so wasn’t interested in that.
Fortunately, homebrew was also an option. So, it turned out to be simply:
homebrew install newsboat
Setup
By default, newsboat will use a ~/.newsboat folder for storing its information. However, if there exists a ~/.config/newsboat and a ~/.local/share/newsboat folders, it will use those instead. So, create those folders before running newsboat for the first time.
You will also need to create a file ~/.config/newsboat/urls containing at least one RSS feed for newsboat to run the first time.
This link in the documentation (Adding Feeds) gives additional information on how to import feeds from an OPML file.
Newsboat is capable of handling podcasts, but for this, I prefer using the dedicated podcast tool Castero.