Snownews is a lightweight RSS newsreader for console lovers. It lets you aggregate news from a variety of sources in one place in a very easy and quick way. Additionally, it comes with Slackware so there is a big chance that it is already installed on your system.
To start Snownews, simply type snownews
in the console.
To add
new feeds, press a, paste a feed URL and hit Enter. The following, for example, is Slackware Documentation Project RSS feed URL:
http://docs.slackware.com/feed.php
You will see the name of the new feeds source. Pressing Enter will display new feeds. To go back to the main screen, press q
Nowadays most websites provide RSS feeds. If there is a website that doesn't, you could try to employ scripts like script4rss to convert static HTML pages to feeds.
To display a list of other commands available, press h which is context dependent:
Your Snownews window does not need to look as gloomy as the one in the pictures above. The background colour is the colour of your terminal and the rest can be configured in the ~/.snownews/colors
file. The file contains 4 variables. By default, it is configured as follows:
enabled:1
It just switches on colour support. Assigning -1
to it would switch off colour support.
new item:5
Display new feeds in magenta.
goto url:4
URLs are displayed in blue
feedtitle:-1
The feed title has no colour.
The ~/.snownews/colors
file contains other color definitions.
The ~/.snownews/keybindings
file contains the program's keybindings. The file syntax is very straightforward:
add feed:a
To add a new feed, you need to press a. If you want to change it, simply replace a
with a key of your choice.
Newsfeeds usually include URLs that can be opened in a web browser. To open a URL, type o (lower-case letter o
). By default, snownews
, being a command line application, opens URLs in another command line tool, ie. Lynx. To change the default browser, type B from the main snownews
window and type:
/usr/bin/firefox %s
From now on, all URLs will open in Firefox.
Snownews has a Christmas related Easter Egg. Simply create the santa_hunta
file inside ~/.snownews/
, open the About
window by pressing A from the main screen and enjoy the game.