newscanoe

Newscanoe

Newscanoe aims to be a minimal reimplementation of the glorious newsboat:

• for UNIX systems and terminal emulators supporting standard VT100 escape sequences (i.e. xterm-derived)
• written in Go but rigorously nonglamorous (i.e. vim-like)
• meant to be lighter and easier to build from source and to distribute.

A tool for all of you information junkies, as simple as you always secretly desired, to organize the internet and make sense of the web.

Configuration

A plain text file (named as config) is used to configure the app: it consists of a list of feed urls with a name preceded by a pound sign (#) (see the example file in this repo) and it is located in the directory $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/newscanoe (or $HOME/.config/newscanoe).

If such file does not already exist, it will be created at the first execution of the app and you will be prompted to manually insert a url by typing a. You can then edit such file with any text editor (vi is the default, unless EDITOR environment variable is set) by running: newscanoe -e.

Once loaded, feeds are cached in the directory $XDG_CACHE_HOME/newscanoe (or $HOME/.cache/newscanoe). The cache can be cleaned up by running newscanoe -c

Keybindings

Supported key bindings:

• r, load/reload the currently selected feed
• R, load/reload all the feeds
• q, quit the app
• BACKSPACE, go back to previous section
• ENTER, go into the currently highlighted element
• l, open an article with lynx (if installed in the system)
• o, open an article with the default (according to xdg-settings) browser for the user's desktop environment
• ^, v, move the cursor to the previous/next row
• Page Up, Page Down, move the cursor to the previous/next page
• a, insert a new feed url by typing it letter-by-letter or pasting it with CTRL+SHIFT+v

Installation

Build from source:

:~$ git clone https://github.com/giulianopz/newscanoe.git
:~$ go build -o newscanoe cmd/newscanoe/main.go && cp ./newscanoe /usr/local/bin

Or download the latest pre-compiled binary from GitHub and then install it into your PATH.

Credits

Much of the wizardry used to control the terminal was inspired by the well-written tutorial Build Your Own Text Editor by Paige Ruten, which explains in depth the source code of kilo, the infamous small text editor conceived by Salvatore Sanfilippo aka antirez.