Hacker News Reader

Comment by begriffs | Hacker News Reader

Why has this become so complicated? I use Newsboat https://newsboat.org/ to read RSS, and follow about 100 very interesting authors that way.

I just put the RSS urls into a text file and the self-contained 1.7mb program does the rest. Somehow it gets by without using a combination of Electron, Mongo, Algolia, Redis, machine learning (!), and Sendgrid.

Maybe the comparison with a text-based RSS reader isn't fair and Winds does some crazy cool stuff, but it's hard to see what that is exactly.

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It all depends on what you are doing with RSS. If you subscribe to feeds who barf out 1000 new articles every hour, then a proper filter-system is a basic neccessary, and machine learning can help there. But I don't know whether this reader is using it for this.

Reading the github, it's seems also kinda questionable why they use multiple databases and services. That gives the impressioen that selfhosting this reader will be a pain. I guess I stay with Tiny Tiny RSS (https://tt-rss.org/) for the moment.

How does Newsboat support non-Latin scripts? Seems like a pretty basic requirement.

E.g., this blog is in Hebrew, you can see the expected text layout on its website: https://workaround.blog/

I wonder if Newsboat can replicate that layout. Here is the RSS feed:

https://workaround.blog/feed/

As you can see here: https://imgur.com/a/Ikff2LX Newsboat handles Hebrew as it's supposed to. That is fetching the article and sending the output to the terminal. It is after all a terminal program and therefore only displays text trough the terminal. You can set the text width though. So I suspect newsboat supports the Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and other non latin scripts which are of a decent size. The rest is all dependant on how you configure your terminal/ the font you use.

My newsboat setup[0] renders RTL incorrectly. Appears to convert both headlines and content into LTR :(

[0] newsboat 2.11.1, Mac, iTerm2 reporting as "xterm-256color", UTF-8.

> Winds does some crazy cool stuff, but it's hard to see what that is exactly

Images, audio and video in content.

I open all three in mpv from newsboat and it does a better job of handling them than a browser would using hardware decoding for videos.

Very lovely, thank you for the suggestion. Looks a lot like default theme of Mutt and Irssi.

Ah, that's great. It can work as a Newsblur client. I'll definitely give it a try.

ehm, I don't think a console rss reader isn't complicated for the common non tech user

What's even more simple is to punch the URL in ASCII numbers to the cards, and put it in the "RSS" deck, then on every Monday morning press play on the program tape, that loads the URL's from the card deck and after a few hours prints all new articles on the mainframe's printer.

I'd expand on this: do you know any non-tech user that uses any console application:

* knowingly

* not having been introduced to it by a techie

* not being forced to use it by their workplace

I don't know any...

And how many tech people also avoid console applications.

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