cool newsboat trick - Query Feeds!


Once again - CLI tools are just better

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For this site, I use RSS. And for RSS, I use the newsboat program, a CLI, vim-like RSS reader. It's great, but I haven't been using its full functionality. See, I've been going through each feed to get content - so I would go to the Jacobin feed, then the Intercept feed, then the U.S. PIRG feed, and so on. Kind of tedious. Well no more! You can pool all of the feeds of a certain tag into one large parent feed adding the following line to your `~/.newsboat/urls` file:


"query:All news:tags # \"news\""


What this does is says, first, we've identified you want to make a query feed - the one with all the feeds in it. Next, is the name. Here I went with 'All news'. Next you put tags, #, and then within \" and \" put the tag you want to pool - here, I'm pooling all of the feeds with the 'news' tag (you have to escape the quote signs to use them, as the quote signs are already used to put tags). Then in the `~/.newsboat/config` file, put the following line:


prepopulate-query-feeds yes


And you're good to go! You can even put tags on the feed (although maybe be careful of putting of self-referencing the query feed with the tag it queries - I haven't tried it but can imagine it going horribly wrong). On all my query feeds, I have the tag "query", so I can go to the list of all query feeds if I want.


One of the advantages of a normal GUI RSS feeder is they typically come with this feature built-in. But newsboat actually had it covered the whole time. This combined with its powerful vim-like functionality, and newsboat is a clear winner in my view.