I’m a big console fan, preferring to do as much work as possible from the command line. So it shouldn’t be surprised that I also use RSS even as others have abandoned it for things like Twitter. I prefer to supplement my news feeds with Twitter and not replace it.

Since the demise of Google Reader, I’ve settled on Feedly as my RSS reader. It’s web interface has keyboard shortcuts, and the Reeder app works very well on my iPhone and iPad. But I think it could be faster

Back to 1990

Before web forums were all the rage, there was Usenet News. It was international, and distributed, which made it very resilient. It was also, for the most part, limited to text interfaces. There were several GUI interfaces for accessing Usenet, but for me, the command line application tin was all I needed. With it I could navigate an alarming amount of posts, selecting the ones I wanted to read while ignore the rest. It was pretty amazing how fast the whole process was. Alas, speed is something we lost on the transition to graphically interfaces.

Enter Newsbeuter

Newsbeuter is an open source command line RSS reader that can run on most UNIX based operating systems. A simple sudo apt-get install newsbeuter installed it on my Ubuntu host, and I was good to go. I’m still in the honeymoon phase, so we’ll see how long it lasts. To see it in action you can check out the screenshots on the Newsbeuter site.