 Recently, I got a question from a viewer of the channel about recommendations for RSS feed readers. And this is a tough one because I have used RSS feed readers in my 12 or 13 year history of using desktop Linux, but I've never used anything that was a traditional RSS feed reader. For example, in my early, early days of using Linux on the desktop, I was using a terminal based RSS feed reader called Kanto. Kanto is no longer being developed. There was another great terminal based RSS feed reader called, I think, Newsbeuter or something like that that was pretty popular way back then. And here recently in the last few years, there's a great terminal RSS feed reader called Newsboat that I've used in the past. I think I made a video about Newsboat a couple of years ago. I've used Newsboat on and off for the last few years as well. And of course, here recently, what I've been doing for a feed reader is just using Emacs because let me open up Emacs. Emacs has a great RSS feed reader called LFeed. It's an extension. You need to install it, of course. But once you install LFeed, you know, it's just your standard RSS feed reader. I could go down here and read this story here. And you know, if I wanted to, I could go down to the link here for the full story. Let me W a couple of times to get over to the link and then hit enter. And it's going to open up the full story in the Emacs web browser. Emacs is built in web browser here and you know, it just opens it in a split and I could read the story or whatever, Q to quit out of the EWW web browser and Q to get back into the main frame of LFeed here. This video is not about LFeed though inside Emacs. And that's the thing is I know most especially people that ask a question like, Hey, can you recommend a RSS feed reader? They're probably new to Linux. They're not sure what's available for an RSS feed reader in Linux. And I can't tell those people to go install Emacs and then go install LFeed because they're not going to know anything about Emacs and they're probably don't even want to install Emacs. I'm also not going to point them in the direction of NewsBoat unless they specifically ask me, Hey, I need a terminal based RSS feed reader. No, most people want a GUI application and there are some good ones. Even though I've never used them long term, I often check them out, especially when I do distro reviews and things. And there is a great RSS feed reader that I came across a couple of years ago that really impressed me and I wanted to share that with you today. So that graphical RSS feed reader that really impressed me a couple of years back was one called feed reader. Now there is a problem with feed reader and why I'm actually not going to discuss feed reader today is because it's no longer being maintained. If I go to the GitHub repository for feed reader, you can see this repository has been archived by the owner. It is now read only and hasn't seen a commit in about two years. And if you read further, you can see that the guy that created feed reader and was maintaining it, he quit maintaining feed reader to go create a new RSS feed reader called News Flash. News Flash, the source for that is hosted over on GitLab instead of GitHub and it looks exactly like feed reader. I mean, it's almost an exact clone. Why did he go and create a new RSS feed reader? I think it had something to do with the language. It looks like feed reader was written in Vala and C for the most part. And News Flash, the current version of this program is actually written in Rust. And of course, Rust is the new hotness. So I know a lot of you guys are looking for Rust programs to try out for those of you that want to install News Flash, News Flash is available as a flat pack. That's probably the easiest way to get it installed on most distros. You could compile it, but the owner does recommend that you don't actually try to compile it from source. He recommends everybody just to use the flat pack for those of you on ArchBase systems, News Flash is available in the AUR. Since I'm on an ArchBase distro, I went ahead and installed News Flash from the AUR. And if I go over to my desktop, let's go ahead. And launch News Flash. So let me go ahead and launch it for the very first time when you launch News Flash. It's going to ask you about RSS services. So if you do your RSS feeds through syncing with an online RSS service, such as Miniflux, Fever, Feedly or Feedbin, you can actually use those services. Now, I don't belong to any of those services. So what I'm going to choose is local RSS. I'm just going to maintain my RSS feeds locally here. And the very first time you run it is going to ask you about featured topics. Some of the stuff I really am interested in, of course, is open source. So I'll click on that. If I want to, I was already going to give me some results here, some feeds I could subscribe to. I want open source for you. We could go ahead and add that feed. We have to set a title. The title is already filled in for us. Of course, you could edit it and then you need to set a category. I think for a category, I'm just going to do open source, the category title. And click add and then open source security. I don't know what that is, but now open source is available for the category for us to choose. I'll do the open source initiative blog. We'll also put that under the open source category. Open source collaborative network, another one I've never heard of, but I'll subscribe to it. Let me see if I can go back and do a different category. So instead of open source, I could search for, how about Linux? Great, in Linux Journal, Linux Journal, I believe is still being maintained. Let's do a different category, though. I'll create a specific Linux category. Linux today, I will also add. And I won't bore you guys when you're subscribing to a million things. I'll subscribe to Reddit. Is this r slash Linux? Probably is. And now that we've got a few things added, let me see how we get this thing to refresh. It looks like there's an icon right here. Yeah, let's go ahead and hit that. And you have this three column layout where you have your categories. And then, of course, for the categories, you'll, of course, get your RSS feeds here. And then if you click it, it will actually give you the full story. It looks like, which is really nice. Let me go to the Linux category, the Linux Journal. Does it give me the full story? I know the Linux Journal stories are typically very long. Yeah, it will give you the entire story when you click on the news feed itself, the RSS feed here. So I will say, you know, for those of us that are used to using things like a terminal RSS feed readers like NewsBoat or L Feed inside Emacs, this is a little bit easier to work with because in NewsBoat, I mean, you've got to view the story in some way. You're probably going to have to view the story if you want to view the full story in a terminal based web browser like links. Of course, in L Feed and Emacs, when you want to view the full story, you've got to use a Emacs-based browser such as EWW. You don't have to do any of that in a GUI program like News Flash. You know, you just click on it and you'll go ahead and get the full story. It even includes the images and everything from the story. So really, really nice. One of the things that is annoying me right now, though, is theming because I have, well, I'm not sure what GTK theme I have set here in Marko Linux. It looks like one of the ARC themes, you know, which is kind of a dark bluish black color, but this column over here is not respecting the GTK theme. So what I want to do is I want to fix that. And it is fixable. What you need to do is go to the little hamburger menu here and go to settings and in settings, go to dark mode. If I turn that on, we get a dark mode, which does now turn the white articles, you know, that were before black text on a white background. It flips those, but it also gives this column a black background as well. You know, it's white font on black background as well. I'm going to turn that off. I actually just want this to respect the GTK theme, if possible. If I go down here to article view, we could change, actually, you could change the colors for the articles. Let me move that out of the way. Midnight is the name of that theme. It really looks like solarized. There's a growth box theme. I'm going to go with the default theme for now. You can also change the font. You can tick off the system font and then specify whatever font it is that you want to use for me. I'm just going to go ahead and use the standard system font for this. It looks pretty good to me. Yeah, I was hoping I could change that column to respect the GTK theme, but it looks like the best I can do is just go to dark mode, which, honestly, I probably would want to use dark mode anyway. We do have key bindings also available for the settings. You know, you can go to next article, previous article with J and K, you know, the up and down keys for the VIM key bindings. I kind of like that. I actually had not tried that. So if I go J for down, yeah, and K for up, yeah, very, very cool. I do like programs that respect the VIM motion keys. And really that that's mostly everything you need to know about newsflash, everything you want in a feed reader, everything you expect to be here is here. I mean, you can mark things as red. So you get the circle up here, toggle as red. You also have toggle as starred. So you can star something if you want. And many people, of course, use tags with their RSS feeds. And you can add a tag with the tag symbol here. Click on it. This article has not been tagged yet. I could click add a tag. Of course, it tells me I need to create some tags. First, adding new tags, new categories and new feeds inside newsflash is very easy. Go to the first column here. And at the very bottom of the first column, you have plus and minus. Click the plus sign and you have add feed, category or tag. And then you just click on whatever it is you're trying to add. For example, if there's a specific feed you want to add, just paste the URL to that feed right there. Now, one of the things that's really neat is, you know, not every feed you want to add is something that you've already know about, right? Sometimes you want to discover new feeds and how do you discover new feeds? Well, you need to bring up that tool that we saw when we first launched newsflash for the very first time, go to settings and go to discover feeds and you get that that search box that we had at the very beginning. And that allows you to search for new feeds. For example, maybe I'm a hardcore gamer and I want to search for feeds related to gaming and it gives me search results that I could add such as Ars Technica gaming or gaming on Linux. That would be a good one to add. Gaming on Linux is a really fantastic publication. So that's just a very cursory look at newsflash, which again is a graphical RSS feed reader. It's written in Rust and it's available on every Linux distribution as long as you can run flat packs on that Linux distribution. It's also available, of course, in the AUR for those of you that run arch or arch-based distros. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Absi, Dallas, Devon, Fran, Gabe, Corbinion, Mitchell, Akami, Arch, 8535, Chris, Chuck, David, the other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Louis, Paul, Pick Veeam, Scott, Wes and Willie. They are the producers of this episode without these guys. This quick look at the newsflash RSS reader. It wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. You'd like to support my work, look for DT over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. I need to add 4chan to my feed reader.