feef

feef

feef isn't a feed reader, it's a feed tool. It can be used in scripts, or as a basis for a feed reader

feef uses Go templates for output formatting and expr for filtering. This makes feef quite easy to use but very flexible. It errs on the "do it all in 1 command" side, for better or for worse

feef is not yet stable. Your mileage may vary as RSS can be very different across the web. If you find a bug or think a feature would go well with feef, create a GitHub issue or a Sourcehut ticket

rationale

• I needed a tool for downloading podcast episodes, and I'm not happy grepping raw XML or manually copy-pasting links
• I want to be notified of new items automatically
• I got annoyed with newsboat's UI. Read/unread was just an annoyance for me (I'm not reading every post on Reddit). The simple feef-read script in this repo allows you to see everything at a glance, without visual clutter.

installation

go get -u -v git.sr.ht/~skuzzymiglet/feef

Put file with the URLs you want to read, one per line, in .config/feef/urls or wherever you put your configs. Alternatively, specify a URLs file with the -U flag.

Note you don't need a URLs file if you provide an exact URL to query

usage

Running feef with no options will print the GUID of every item of every feed in your URLs file.

URL matching

Use -u to specify an URL. You can use exact URL, or prefix with these symbols:

• ~: fuzzy match
• /: regex (Go regexp) match
• ?: glob match

~ and / alone can be used to match every URL

Default: ~

templates

feef uses Go templates to format the output

Templates specified with -f are printed to the standard output, with newlines between them. Templates specified with -c are evaluated then passed as commands to the shell

To find out what fields you can use, see gofeed.Item. Additionaly, you can use .Feed to access the parent gofeed.Feed. You can see all the values in an item with the template {{.}}

Some useful template functions are provided:

• datef: format dates
• slug: transform a string into a path/URL friendly format
• trunc: truncate a string to a length
• truncPad: truncate or pad a string to a length
• sanitizeHTML: sanitize HTML (strictest policy)

Refer to defaultFuncMap for definitions

Default: {{.GUID}} (the GUID of the item)

filtering

Filtering is done with expr expressions. The same data is provided to expressions as to templates. Expressions must return a boolean.

Default: true

notifications

feef can notify you of new items. Specify a notification mode with -n. There are 3 modes:

• new: print new items
• all: print all items, then new items as they come
• none: print all items and exit

You can use -r to control the interval for polling feeds for changes. By default this is 2 minutes

Default: none

other options

• -s sorts items chronologically. All items need to be accumulated, which makes this seem slow
• -e exit when commands (-c) fail
• -E exit when there's an error fetching a feed (TODO)
• -m n stops feef after n numbers have passed through the filter
• -p n allows up to n threads to be fetching at the same time
• -l controls the log level. This can be one of panic, fatal, error, warn, info, debug or trace, case-insensitive. See the loglevel-parsing code
• --cpu-profile and --memory-profile run CPU and memory profiles respectively. The location of the profiles is printed to stderr at the end

examples

feef -f '{{.Link}}' -u '~lobsters' -i 'Title contains "Genode"' # Show me the links of items with titles containing Genode on Lobsters
feef -n new -c "notify-send '{{.Feed.Title}}' '{{.Title}}'" -f '{{.Link}}' # Notify me of new items with notify-send
feef -s -m 10 -c "wget -nc -O '{{slug .Title}}.mp3' '{{(index .Enclosures 0).URL}}' || echo {{.Title}} already downloaded" -u 'https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:237055046/sounds.rss' # Download the 10 newest items of the Lingthusiasm podcast

UI

The feef-read script is a simple but flexible RSS reader, with notifications of new items. The items are formatted and piped into fzf. You can fuzzy-search the items.

feef-read binds these keys:

• enter: open the selected item's Link with xdg-open or the $OPENER environment variable
• tab: toggles the sort order between best match and chronological
• ctrl-d: downloads the item's Link using wget or the $DOWNLOADER environment variable

feef-read also notifies you of new items using notify-send

BUGS/TODO

Bugs and TODOs are noted in comments near the relevant code. A quick rg TODO should work. Major ones are listed here:

• Logging and loglevel separation need work
• A way to work feed-wise is needed. Currently you can't retrieve info about a feed
• Libify the logic
• Provide more info to expr filters