Newsboat Terminal RSS and Atom Feed Reader
Newsboat is an actively maintained RSS/Atom feed reader for the text console. A fork of the discontinued Newsbeuter, it provides a fast, keyboard-driven interface for subscribing to, reading, and managing feeds with powerful filtering, macro support, and scriptable automation.
Newsboat is an actively maintained RSS/Atom feed reader for the text console. A fork of the discontinued Newsbeuter, it provides a fast, keyboard-driven interface for subscribing to, reading, and managing feeds with powerful filtering, macro support, and scriptable automation.
npx skills add agentskillexchange/skills --skill newsboat-terminal-rss-atom-feed-reader
Newsboat is an open-source RSS and Atom feed reader designed for text terminals, written in C++ and Rust. It is the actively maintained successor to Newsbeuter and provides a fast, efficient way to consume web feeds entirely from the command line.
Core Features
Newsboat supports RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, JSON Feed, and OPML import/export. It handles multiple feed URLs defined in a simple text file, automatic feed refreshing at configurable intervals, article caching in an SQLite database, and configurable keybindings. Articles can be opened in an external browser, and the built-in search function filters across all feeds.
Filtering and Organization
A powerful query language allows creating virtual feeds based on article attributes like title, author, date, content, and feed source. Articles can be flagged, tagged, and organized into folders. Kill filters automatically hide articles matching specified criteria, reducing noise in high-volume feeds. Conditional formatting changes how articles are displayed based on their attributes.
Automation and Scripting
Newsboat supports macros that chain multiple commands into single keystrokes. The bookmark command pipes article URLs to external scripts for integration with read-later services, note-taking tools, or archival systems. The exec-url feature allows defining feeds whose content comes from the output of external commands rather than URLs, enabling custom data sources.
Agent Integration
AI agents can configure Newsboat through its text-based configuration files (urls and config), adding and removing feed subscriptions programmatically. The SQLite cache database can be queried directly for article metadata and content. The exec-url feature allows agents to inject custom feed sources. Newsboat can also export its database and OPML for further processing by downstream tools.
Installation
Newsboat is packaged for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE, FreeBSD, and macOS (via Homebrew). The latest release is version 2.43, released March 22, 2026. Source tarballs with GPG signatures are available from newsboat.org.