Show HN: Cleed – Simple feed reader for the command line

82 points by radulucut 10 months ago | 26 comments
  • genericacct 10 months ago
    What are you using to store feed urls? It would be kind of cool and interoperable if you used newline separated textfiles
  • DamonHD 10 months ago
    How many of my TL;DR points here https://www.earth.org.uk/RSS-efficiency.html do you already deal with, out of interest?
    • radulucut 10 months ago
      2 and 3 so far, but I am planning to support the others as well, thanks.
      • DamonHD 10 months ago
        Hurrah! I have those listed in likely order of resource/climate impact, so if I could nudge you towards considering (1) sooner then even bettererer! B^>
      • cogman10 10 months ago
        Not that I disagree with this for any HTTP service, but how big of an issue is the network/compute power for RSS?

        Seems like a minor payload to be delivered. I guess it makes a difference in the performance/UX of the reader itself.

        • hk__2 10 months ago
          In addition to performance it also has to do with politeness: it’s not polite to ask for the same resources again and again from a server when you could cache it, especially when it has explicit headers about it in its response. Think of small self-hosted blogs with hundreds of readers that constantly poll it.
          • cogman10 10 months ago
            Even with a small self-hosted blog, assuming you have more than a 56k hookup to the internet, a raspberry pi can service up 100s of requests per second.

            At the time of writing this, the HN rss feed is 12kb. That'd mean you'd need 10Mbps upload to handle 100s of requests to the rss feed per second.

            (Again, not saying you shouldn't optimize this, just questioning how big a problem it is).

          • djbusby 10 months ago
            The link claims we could save "100kWh per day" and there is a dataset provided (I didn't dig in that yet)
            • DamonHD 10 months ago
              I am trying to better assess this number as part of an arXiv paper I am putting together. Maybe even this weekend!

              RSS/podcast feed polling is a load for which Apple/Amazon/Spotify/Podbean are currently wasting 99%+ of the network and CPU bandwidth for, and thus money and carbon emissions. Many of the creators have limited budgets, and reaching Net Zero is not going to happen by ignoring really easy cases such as this, albeit small in the overall scheme of things.

        • gshikha912 10 months ago
          this is not for linux ?
        • slightwinder 10 months ago
          Looks nice. But I'ts strange that there are so many "simple" feedreaders. Where are the tools for powerusers? How many feeds and formats are people using usually to be satisfied with simple?
          • toyg 10 months ago
            Feedparsing is a classic starter project for people who want to learn a language.
            • tester457 10 months ago
              What poweruser tools are you missing in newsboat?
              • ghostpepper 10 months ago
                Not the OP but my biggest missing features would be: - the ability to send the output of one smart query into the input of another - not needing to escape every quotation mark in a query, and maybe the ability to combine operands eg ( title =~ {linux,macos} as opposed to title =~ \"linux\" or title =~ \"macOS\") - a dashboard mode that can show a snippet of the top headlines and maybe autoscroll - ability to mark an article as read after a certain delay

                I've started working on my own "power user" RSS reader that lets you weight the keywords you're interested in (so an article that hits important keywords but is older could be displayed above an article that's newer) but it's still closer to a proof-of-concept than a complete app.

                • stevekemp 10 months ago
                  I think this is one of the reasons I started using rss2email back in the day - I could do the filtering, searching, and manipulation using my preferred email client.

                  Originally that would have been mutt, later my own client, and later still I switched to gsuite.

                  I did add support for excluding entries/posts based on title, body, regular expression, and similar, but at the end of the day I just fetch all feed entries and save them as emails. The later processing can be done by any client and that's pretty flexible. There's very little custom processing required in the RSS-processing itself.

                  • xyzsparetimexyz 10 months ago
                    =~ does a regex match, so you can use =~ \"linux|macos\"
                  • slightwinder 10 months ago
                    A good GUI with Real scripting. A portable version. Maybe better documentation. A client/server-architecture, or some other kind of headless mode with remote access.
                    • FerretFred 10 months ago
                      This is an excellent comment!
                  • lwhsiao 10 months ago
                    How does this compare to newsboat?
                    • 10 months ago
                      • BigParm 10 months ago
                        [flagged]
                        • 10 months ago
                        • gaws 10 months ago
                          Newsboat is better.
                        • whalesalad 10 months ago

                              with arms wide open
    under the RSS feed
    welcome to this place
    i'll show you XML
                          • chuck_y 10 months ago
                            [flagged]