Using newsbeuter with tmux and w3m to read news

I consume most news through RSS feeds. If you don’t, this post is probably of no interest to you.

Twitter’s nice and all, but I can’t stand the constant interruptions, and it feels quite stupid to read all those super-real-time conversations hours after the fact. I can’t be bothered at the moment, plus I’m busy. :)

Furthermore, I’m using a console program to read news, which is called newsbeuter. Call me old school if you want, I don’t mind. I’ve tried a bunch of other RSS readers: graphical, e-mail based, web based, but I kept coming back to newsbeuter. YMMV, but it politely does its job, lets you configure about every aspect of it, filter your feeds, etc. I love it.

When I want to read an article, I often send it to an external browser in a read-later kind of way, while I skim through other feeds. That’s sspecially true for hacker-news type feeds, where you’re only getting a link-feed. Generally, it can result in a few billion opened tabs, of which I’ll read a few million, which in turn can lead to more little tab offsprings, ad nauseam. In the end, quite a lot of noise, or a simple case of information overload. So, a few days ago, I decided I would try another approach to read less noise, and get more sleep.

While running newsbeuter in tmux it is actually very simple to split the virtual window to open interesting articles in a pane. That means using a text-mode browser, no javascript/css, no “Send to instapaper”, or whatever. Just the text. I’ve been killing boring prose in seconds for a week, so I guess it works for me.

Here how’s you might do it. First, you’ll add this line to your newsbeuter config file:

browser "~/bin/open-in-pane"

This configures newsbeuter so that the external browser is actually a little (shell) script that you will find here:

#!/bin/sh





W3M='/usr/bin/w3m'





# If the window has only one pane, create one by splitting.
  
pane_count=`tmux list-panes -F '#{line}' | wc -l`
  
if [ $pane_count -lt 2 ]; then
  
    tmux split-window -h
  
fi





# Start my reader if it ain't running already, and send it the URL to
  
# open.
  
w3m_process_count=`ps auxw | grep "$W3M" | grep -cv grep`
  
if [ $w3m_process_count = '1' ];then
  
    tmux send-keys -t 1 "TU" "C-u" "$1
  
"
  
    tmux select-pane -t 0
  
else
  
    tmux send-keys -t 1 "$W3M \"$1\"
  
"
  
    tmux select-pane -t 0
  
fi





# Done! :)
  

Save this to ~/bin/open-in-pane, chmod+x it, and you should be set. I’m using w3m’s tab feature, but since it is very limited, I can’t abuse it. Also, double-check the URLs you’re opening, since this shell script does absolutely no effort at preventing evil URLs from escaping. You’ve been warned. :)

Hope this helps anyway.