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Table of Contents
Snownews
Downloading and Reading RSS feeds
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.
Starting Snownews
To start Snownews, simply type snownews in the console.
Adding New Feeds
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.
Other Commands
To display a list of other commands available, press h which is context dependent:
Feed Sources List View
Feed List View
Feed View
Snownews Colours
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.
Snownews Keybindings
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.
Open Links from Feeds in a Web Browser
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.
Easter Egg
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.
Links
- List of other popular RSS newsreaders.
