Hacker News Reader

Comment by gue5t | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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