i love the terminal. i didn't have much of an incentive to use CMD when i was still on windows, but there are many fun and useful terminal programs for linux! so much so, that you could do basic news reading and internet browsing without any graphical user interfaces.

newsboat is a terminal rss feed reader. to work, it needs a minimum of one rss feed configured in the text file ~/.newsboat/urls, which could look like this:


running the command newsboat now, you'll be able to view your different feeds:


the interface is in german, but i digress. you can move the selection between feeds using the UP and DOWN ARROW KEYS. hitting R will reload the selected feed and SHIFT + R will reload all feeds, which means it'll fetch new articles using your internet connection. hitting ENTER on any feed will allow you to see the list of new articles:


and lastly, selecting an article and pressing ENTER will show you the article itself:


you can press O at any of these screens to go back to the previous screen.

now... i realized quickly that most news websites don't put their whole article into the rss entries, because wouldn't that be way too convenient?

newsboat allows you to press O when viewing an article in order to open it with your default browser. in the file ~/.newsboat/config, i'm telling newsboat to use the text-only browser w3m instead. because my desktop environment's terminal doesn't properly support images, i'm adding an extra option to the w3m command to disable image loading:


now we're on line !!! yippie !!!


once again you can use Q to exit here. here's some more shortcuts: one surprising discovery i've made is that reading fanfiction like this is genuinely amazing. i highly recommend taking advantage of ao3's rss feature.

even if i was walking around with nothing but a shitty little tty-only linux laptop i can read the news and catch up on what's happening. love it!!! that's my nerding for now.