nion's blog

Yay, newsbeuter 2.0 was just released! I am way too lazy to summarize all the new features and bugfixes, It's just to many of them. Here is the changelog:

Added more flexible dialog handling
Improved position handling in article list (fixes #112; thanks to Isaac Good)
Fixed a lot of bugs (#102, #111, #117, #130, #131).
Added ability to specify a list of OPML URLs when using OPML as URL source.
Added config option "keep-articles-days" to optionally keep articles only for a limited number of days.
Added config option "bookmark-interactive" to indicate that the configured bookmarking command is interactive.
Don't display authentication information in URLs (fixes #121).
Replaced mrss with new RSS/Atom parser.
Added ability to search for text from the article view.
Added basic support for Yahoo Media RSS.
Made article view pager configurable.
Improved HTML rendering of links and underlined and bold text.
Added ":source" commandline command to (re)load configuration files.
Implemented "pipe-to" key to pipe articles to external commands.
Implemented backtick evaluation for configuration files.
Extended filter language with "between" operator.
Added "age" attribute for articles to filter them for relative age (in days).
Extended "set" commandline command to toggle boolean variables and reset configuration variables of all types to their default.
Added ability to configure local files as feeds.
Added a "random-unread" key to go to a random unread article.
When opening articles from a search result dialog, make search phrase stand out in article view.
Persist commandline and search history.
Implemented commandline completion.
Improved help dialog so that it now shows unbound functions.
Added ability to sort feed list and article list by interactively choosing the sort method.
Improved and extended conditional HTTP download handling.

The full release annoucement by ak is available on: http://newsbeuter.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/newsbeuter-20-released/

Also just uploaded the package to Debian unstable.

Quoting ak:

Exactly 650 days after I started developing newsbeuter, I declare newsbeuter officially “finished”, in the sense that it contains all the features that I wanted to have in it. It was a great effort, hours and hours of programming, debugging and answering support requests, but it paid off, and the result is probably the greatest console-based RSS feed reader that ever existed.

newsbeuter also has its own website from now on, located on: http://www.newsbeuter.org/.

I consider newsbeuter really the perfect newsreader and as feature rich as the equivalent for mail: mutt.

The main improvements for me in 1.0 are

• highlighting of text defined by regular expressions


• search function in the help dialog (newsbeuter really got quite a lot of commands in the meantime)


• reset-unread-on-update option which enables you to get updates on specific blog entries if they change in the future

Besides those features newsbeuter glances with a long list of other features:

• podcast support


• ssl support


• auto-reload


• only display unread blogs


• bookmark support


• specify article format strings


• key binding support


• external html rendering support


• article filtering based on regular expressions aka killfile


• macro support


• proxy support


• ompl export/import


• tagging of blogs


• article saving


• custom filter scripts


• on-the-fly variable editing (we know that from mutt, vim, etc.)


• bloglines synchronisation


• query feeds (meta feeds on top of the feeds specified in URLs selected by a filter expression)


• usual key bindings to mark as read/unread etc.

Which command line rss feed reader can mess with this while also providing a good, intuitive user interface we know
from other quality text-mode applications like vim and others? ;-P
Thank you ak for developing this excellent piece of software!

I just uploaded the new release of newsbeuter 0.8 to Debian.
Like every release this one also has cool new features:

• It implements custom configurability of feed list and article list format like we know it from mutt
• improved reload speed
• special tags to rename feeds
• macro support, they let you define one key for multiple actions (open a feed and reload it for example)

The 0.8 release also adds ruby scripting support which is not enabled yet in the Debian package because it's undocumented at the moment.

This release also forked the mrss and nxml libs which caused a lot of breakage in newsbeuter related to ABI changes in the past and integrated them into newsbeuter.

I did not link the package against this fork because I think doing it this way is not the right solution for several reasons (fixing bugs in static code copies rather than just in the shared library is always a PITA) but I also can understand Andreas that he does not want to rely on the upstream author of these libs since he showed multiple times that he does not really have a clue of writing shared libraries and how to keep the ABI stable.

I have a different fix in the package which hopefully solves that two for future updates of these libraries.

Ak just released newsbeuter-0.4.
Now I guess newsbeuter is the most feature-rich RSS reader available for text-mode. Not even raggle has more (AFAIK).

Here are the new features:

• introduced configuration option to disable cache cleanup


• introduced configuration option to set the HTTP user-agent header to a custom value


• significant speed improvement for reload and cache cleanup


• added Italian translation


• added an "include" configuration command to make it possible to separate the configuration into several files


• introduced global configuration file /etc/newsbeuter/config


• added support for Snownews/Liferea extension scripts

The support for extension script rocks, now you write shell scripts which generate output, newsbeuter uses as input for example!

I already uploaded the package to Debian unstable. While the buildds still compile, get it from incoming.

I just uploaded newsbeuter 0.3 to unstable (get it from incoming until it hits the archive).

The release is mainly a bugfix release but there are also some cool new features and improvements.
- The html rendering especially encoding issues are fixed now.
- Everything is stored as UTF-8 internally and gets converted on-the-fly.
- libidn is not needed anymore
- gettext support (at the moment just german translation, translators wanted)

And last but not least podcast support.
For this there is a new tool included in newsbeuter named podbeuter. When updating feeds newsbeuter searches for podcast files and
adds them to a download queue. podbeuter then is the download manager to do automatic or manual downloads of the podcasts.



Have fun and test it.
Oh and YVFI we hang around in #newsbeuter on freenode now

ak released version 0.2 of his RSS reader newsbeuter.
When I blogged last time about newsbeuter, newsbeuter already had a lot of cool features but version 0.2 is really damn sexy.

As ak demonstrates in his blog 0.2 brings features like:
- configurable keybindings
- color configuration
- HTTP proxy support
- tagging/categorization of blogs
- auto-reload after specified time interval
- searching for blogs and blog entries
- auto load on start
- hide old feeds/only show feeds with new articles
- save articles (with default save path)
- jump to next unread article
- read while reloading (posix threads)
- show ulrs of article (like urlview does)
- import/export feeds in OPML
- ATOM, RSS 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0 support (libmrss >= 0.17)
- mutt/slrn/vim like ncurses interface (libstfl)

There is no need to give an introduction of how to use newsbeuter, since the online documentation is very good.

Good bye snownews, good bye raggle, long live newsbeuter!

Give it a try on: http://synflood.at/newsbeuter/newsbeuter-0.2.tar.gz.

Debian package will be uploaded soon (thanks panthera), in the meantime:
apt-get install libnxml0 libmrss0 libsqlite3-0 libidn11 && wget http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/newsbeuter/newsbeuter_0.2-1_i386.deb && dpkg -i newsbeuter_0.2-1_i386.deb
UPDATE: Can be installed from unstable now

AK released 0.1 version of the text mode rss feed reader newsbeuter (website down at the moment of writing this) formerly known as noos but had to be renamed because the name is protected by some French ISP.

I recently blogged about newsbeuter so there is not really much to say for now.
Try it out.
Get a debian package at:
apt-get install libnxml0 libmrss0 libsqlite3-0 libidn11 && wget http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/newsbeuter/newsbeuter_0.1-1_i386.deb && dpkg -i newsbeuter_0.1-1_i386.deb

Hopefully soon in the official pool.