Krill: A terminal feed reader supporting RSS and Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Krill: A terminal feed reader supporting RSS and Twitter

github.com

69 pointsqfx319 comments

As an existing solution, newsbeuter [1] is an excellent and fast terminal reader with many features. I have settled with it for a while after trying many alternatives. If you are too much into e-mails and using a terminal reader like mutt, sending new feeds as e-mails with rss2email [2] is also an option.

[1]: http://newsbeuter.org/

[2]: https://github.com/wking/rss2email/

I'll put in another nod for newsbeuter.

rsstail and multitail allow for a true console-mode feed-as-stream. Quite useful that.

Does newsbeuter support filters?

Have been through a fair few FOSS feed readers since Reader went away. Currently settled on Newsbeuter but it doesn't get as much use as it should. I see this being scanned much more frequently, particularly due to the live stream view which for RSS and Twitter searches is very cool. Had played with the CLI Twitter client t but didn't stick with it. This might have enough varied content options under one roof to keep me visiting.

Nice one! Fwiw I also like the README emoji usage and dig reading articles in the terminal. I just like and want the text. Most times the rest is noise. Apart from these emoji.

RSS feed readers can be fun. I have one hooked up to a Teletype machine from 1926.[1] It usually follows the Reuters top news feed. I've tried feeding it from Twitter, but the banality of Twitter is just too painful to watch at that speed.

[1] https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14

What can you get from Twitter without credentials any more? I used to have a Twitter reader with spam filtering, but it's useless now.

You can go to, e.g. https://twitter.com/nagle, and read some dude's tweets.

Does Twitter block you if you poll that too much?

I'm sure there's a point at which it becomes too much, but that's basically how I browse Twitter.

Totally knee-jerk—I've merely scanned the github page—but shouldn't this be called "Baleen" instead? :-)

Both krill and baleen whales are filter feeders (i.e. eat what they find filtering water). Baleen sounds like a good name for PyQt GUI to krill.

What differentiates this from every other feed reader, aside from a million emoji in the README?

I'd like a feed reader that has low memory consumption, marks things I've already seen as read so I don't see them again, and which defers actual display of HTML feeds (such as RSS) to other software like a web browser.

For Atom/RSS canto should cover your needs, provided you are looking for a terminal based reader. It runs as a daemon with a ncurses interface. http://codezen.org/canto-ng/ Newsbeuter should be interesting, but I've never used it.

+1 for Canto, it was my go-to reader when I still used one. Nurses is great for distraction-free reading.

I tried it, because although it doesn't let me keep using my web browser to read RSS-syndicated feeds (which often has pictures that don't do well in the terminal), I couldn't tell from the website if it remembers what you've read. It does, and I'll have to look at the logic it uses for that if I ever break down and write the software I'd like to use. I'm not sure what the right combination of timestamps and post url/content make up the right signal to prevent post edits and site reorganizations from mucking things up.

But it uses more RAM than my window manager, (GTK-based) text editor, taskbar, or shell, just to load the stock 3 feeds. And then canto-curses takes half a second to open (on hot cache, so it isn't waiting on mass to scoot anywhere, but it makes about 3000 syscalls interrogating the disk for all its dependency libraries), waits for a full second to do nothing while closing ("select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {1, 0}) = 0 (Timeout) <1.001081>" in strace), and uses even more RAM than the daemon--with an entire additional python interpreter.

Thanks for the recommendation, though. I'll let you know if I find what I'm looking for.

Once hacked tw.sh [1] to read read tweets in newsbeuter or liferea RSS reader. Translates displayed URL into href to not redirect via Twitter (would be nice for Krill, too). Too much scraping may get you locked, though.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/gnuarch/4e698aba900a2693d545

How does this compare with Rainbowstream as a Twitter client?

http://www.rainbowstream.org/ https://github.com/DTVD/rainbowstream

Rainbowstream is a full-featured Twitter client while krill merely displays tweets. Rainbowstream uses the Twitter API, krill parses Twitter's HTML and therefore requires no Twitter credentials at all.

I'll stick with Rainbowstream then, Thanks :)

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