A news aggregator is software which collect news, weblog posts, and other information from the web so that they can be read in a single location for easy viewing. With the range of news sources available on the internet, news aggregators play an essential role in helping users to quickly locate breaking news.
For people that read lots of weblogs, a news aggregator makes keeping track of them effortless, and particularly useful if the weblogs are only updated occasionally.
There are a number of different file formats which information publishers use. The most frequently ones are RSS and Atom. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. It is a defined standard based on XML with the specific purpose of delivering updates to web-based content. In other words, RSS is a Web content syndication format.
goread is an RSS/Atom feed reader for the terminal. It’s written in Go and published under an open source license.
Installation
We decided to install goread from the goread package located in the Arch User Repository.
As the AUR is for Arch and Arch-based distros, if you’re running a different distro, you’ll need to install goread in a different way. We recommend installing the software with go, the internal package manager.
$ go install github.com/TypicalAM/goread@latest
This command installs goread to ~/go/bin. If that directory is not in your PATH, copy the file to a directory already in your PATH such as /usr/local/bin, or add ~/go/bin to your PATH.
In Operation
The first thing you’ll want to do is add some news feeds. In the example below we’re adding our news feed to illustrate the process.
To add a feed, we navigate to the Tech section, and press nor ctrl+n. You’ll see the dialog box below in which we’ve entered:
Name: LinuxLinks.com
URL: https://www.linuxlinks.com/feed/
LinuxLinks.com will now appear in the Tech section. Press enter to access our feed.
goread’s configuration file containing links to RSS feeds is stored in a urls file which is stored at ~/.config/goread/urls.yml
goread lets you download articles, categorize feeds, and also has OPML file support. The program’s keyboard shortcuts are displayed by pressing h or ctrl+h.
Summary
goread gets our recommendation. It has an attractive and easy to use text-based user interface, and its default color scheme is attractive. A great distraction-free way to keep abreast of your favorite web sites.
If you don’t like the color scheme, it’s easy to generate a color scheme using Pywal, a tool that generates a color palette from the dominant colors in an image.
Sadly there’s currently no support for terminal image previews or customizable keybinds.
There’s pretty stiff competition. We’ve compiled roundups of our recommended graphical, terminal, and self-hosted news aggregators. We’ll shortly add goread to the terminal-based roundup.
Website: github.com/TypicalAM/goread
Support:
Developer: Adam Piaseczny
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
goread is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.