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+# minrss, a lightweight feed reader
+
+2023-05-14
+
+![](/public/img/minrss-mrss.jpg)
+
+## purpose
+
+If you want to read content online from many different websites, the best way is to subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds.
+It's a simple, universal format for getting content onto your screen.
+
+I personally enjoy living in the terminal.
+One of the more popular RSS readers for this environment is [Newsboat](https://newsboat.org/).
+Newsboat has tons of useful features and a pretty TUI, and I did use it for a while.
+
+However, I thought that it was too complex for what I needed in an RSS reader.
+Therefore, I decided to write a new one: MinRSS.
+
+## concept
+
+MinRSS is a small binary that "does one thing and does it well":
+it downloads RSS articles to disk.
+
+Essentially, every feed is represented as a
+folder, and individual articles are files in these folders.
+
+Every time the binary is run, it creates a structure like this in the current working
+directory:
+
+    rss
+    |--news
+    |  |--article1
+    |  `--article2
+    `--blog
+      |--post
+      `--other_post
+
+If an article is new (it wasn't on disk already), its filename is printed to standard output.
+
+The goal of doing things this way is to make writing scripts as easy as possible.
+If you're familiar with shell scripting, all you need is `jq`
+and you can now parse RSS and implement any custom feature you want.
+
+If you felt masochistic, you could even read RSS feeds using only your shell, `minrss`, `ls`, `head` and `w3m`.
+
+This sort of structure is inspired by suckless.org's
+[ii](http://tools.suckless.org/ii/) and [sic](http://tools.suckless.org/sic/).
+
+### wrapper script
+
+I wrote my own wrapper script around MinRSS, called `mrss`.
+It has the following features:
+
+- Update feeds using MinRSS
+- Show all new articles using `fzf` as an interface (as seen in the screenshot above)
+- Mark articles as read
+- Mark articles as "watch later"
+- Custom handler for opening videos and podcasts in `mpv`
+
+## installation
+
+First, ensure you have the requirements:
+
+- libcurl
+- libxml2
+- json-c
+- xdg-open
+
+Clone the repo:
+
+    git clone https://github.com/dogeystamp/minrss
+    cd minrss
+
+Edit the config file.
+The comments in `config.h` should guide you:
+    
+    cp config.def.h config.h
+    vim config.h
+
+MinRSS outputs human-readable output by default.
+The wrapper script will only work with these options set:
+
+    static const enum outputFormats outputFormat = OUTPUT_JSON;
+    static const enum summaryFormats summaryFormat = SUMMARY_FILES;
+
+Then, build and install MinRSS:
+
+    make install
+
+Install the wrapper script:
+
+	cp contrib/mrss.sh ~/.local/bin/mrss
+	chmod 755 ~/.local/bin/mrss
+
+## usage
+
+For complete help, run `mrss -h`.
+
+To get started, all you need is `mrss update` to update feeds, then `mrss fzf` to view articles.
+
+#### fzf shortcuts
+In `mrss`'s `fzf` interface, the following commands are available:
+
+| Command | Shortcut | Description |
+| ------- | -------- | ----------- |
+| `/read` | `Enter` | Opens link in the browser or `mpv` |
+| `/purge` | `Ctrl-D` | Mark article as read |
+| `/purge-all` | `Ctrl-Alt-D` | Mark all articles as read |
+| `/watch-later` | `Ctrl-W` | Send article to the watch-later folder |
+| `/queue` | `Ctrl-E` | Queues link to be opened after leaving `fzf` |
+
+You can also use `Tab` and `Shift-Tab` to select multiple articles to be acted upon.
+
+#### viewing specific folders
+
+The `mrss fzf` command can be used to view a specific folder's contents.
+For example, use
+
+    mrss fzf null-program
+
+to read all null-program articles (regardless of if they are marked read or not).
+Or, run
+
+    mrss fzf watch-later
+
+to see articles you've marked as "watch later".