Newsraft 0.20 Released for RSS Aggregation

A new console program called Newsraft 0.20 has been released, which supports RSS and Atom formats for reading news articles. Newsraft is designed to gather content from various blogs and platforms, providing a unified interface using the ncurses library.

Inspired by the popular newsboat application, Newsraft serves as a lightweight alternative. The main objective of the project is to offer similar functionality to a full-fledged news reader while minimizing the source code. In comparison, Newsboat consists of approximately 40,000 lines of code, whereas Newsraft has only about 9,000 lines. The project is implemented in the programming language C (C99) and is distributed under the ISC license. The project code can be found here.

Key features of Newsraft include:

  • Organizing news articles into groups/sections
  • Automatic updates for individual articles and entire sections
  • Assigning multiple actions to a single key
  • Viewing news content in HTML format
  • Opening links with a single key press using any program (e.g., MPV)
  • Browsing news from all sections in explore mode
  • Text search functionality
  • Parallel updates of multiple articles (number of updates equal to the number of processor cores)
  • Extensive configuration options available through a configuration file

The latest version of Newsraft introduces several new features and improvements:

  • News search capability
  • Support for assigning multiple actions to a single key
  • Accounting for the ISPERMALINK attribute in RSS articles
  • Correction of issues with the clock belt in RFC 3339 dates
  • Added date of publication specifier to the Menu -ite-Entry-Format setup
  • Support for tapes distributed through the Gopher and Gophers protocols
  • Using Cflags from the PKG-Config system if available
  • Implementation of a preliminary set of tests
  • Added a hint to update empty articles
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.