💾 Archived View for perplexing.space › 2020 › emacs-newsticker.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:21:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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2020-08-18
I use emacs for a lot of things, I won't really try to excuse it, it just slowly became the better option for so many things over time. I've tried elfeed⁰ in the past but never got too much into RSS, let alone RSS in emacs. Something about the elfeed interface left me nonplussed, maybe it is the focus on a kind of search-based usage which is wholly unlike my own. I found out today that there is actually an RSS reader bundled in emacs, called Newsticker¹.
I still need to work on a few bits of configuration, at this point I've just dumped a bunch of feed links and called "newsticker-start". For the most part this has worked fine but there are a few oddities. Firstly, many feeds are marked as having no new items and everything appears to be "read". I'm not sure if this is intentional for old feed items or a result of something in the feed itself, since some feeds don't exhibit this behavior. It isn't yet a big deal since I intend to browse through most of them by hand at first to catch-up on all the things I missed. It'll be annoying in the future though!
Secondly, it seems that the HTML renderers in use for newsticker do surprising things to preformatted text. For many feeds this doesn't matter and the default rendering (I'm using SHR) works, however for those entries with code this is less than optimal. I've settled on simply opening in a browser (eww in my case), for which there is already a keybinding "v". The one bit to solve was that opening in eww did not bring the buffer to the foreground which required I "v" and then "C-x b eww" to read the post in the browser.
I've gotten around this with a really basic addition and remapping:
(defun my-newsticker-eww-view () (interactive) (newsticker-treeview-browse-url) (switch-to-buffer "*eww*")) (define-key newsticker-treeview-item-mode-map [remap newsticker-treeview-browse-url] 'my-newsticker-eww-view)
Immediately I find myself much happier with Newsticker. Now to dive into the more involved aspects of grouping feeds and the "unread" issue. Let me know if you have already figured any of this out or have any Newsticker hints.