Create an "Unread" RSS Feed Group with newsboat

By chimo on (updated on )

I’ve been using newsboat as my RSS Reader for a while now and I am really liking it. Although I realized recently that one thing I was missing from it was the ability to have a single “Unread” group containing all unread articles from all the different RSS feeds I’m subscribed to.

By default, newsboat shows you the list of your feeds along with an “Unread/Total” article count. I’ve used it this way for a long time but recently I caught myself loading newsboat, but then turning to my phone to read articles via miniflux’s progressive web app (PWA).

I paused a moment to wonder why that was and realized that since I’ve been busy/lazy/insert-excuse-here lately, the number of unread articles has been growing to the point where it was difficult to find which articles were new with newsboat. I also have the bad habit of leaving things “Unread” as a reminder to get back to them later, to make matters worse.

Finding new articles wasn’t so much a problem with miniflux since, by default, it shows you all your unread articles with the most recent ones at the top.

I did a bit of searching and it turns out you can create a “Unread” group, similar to what miniflux shows you, within newsboat.

First, add the following to your “~/.config/newsboat/urls” file (create it if it doesn’t exist):

"query:Unread Articles:unread = \"yes\""
Update: If you're using the "Starred items" special feed that some backends support and you "star" an unread article, it'll show up twice in the "Unread Articles" feed. To prevent that from happening, the following query can be used: 
"query:Unread Articles:(unread = \"yes\") and (feedtitle != \"Starred items\")"

Next, if you want to see this group by default when launching newsboat, add the following to “~/.config/newsboat/config”:

run-on-startup goto-title "Unread Articles" ; open

Done! You can get back to newsboat’s default view of all your individual feeds by pressing ‘q’.

One habit I’m planning on changing though is using miniflux’s “Star” feature, which newsboat supports, as reminders for articles I want to get back to instead of leaving them as unread.