RSass

RSass is a small RSS reader that was written out of annoyance with Feedly.

It does not have a lot of features, it is just a tiny, hacked-together thing, and it barely works. But it does work!

WARNING: This is alpha quality software. Expect bugs, stuff to break, things to not work properly. Bug reports are appreciated, and RSass will get better. Until then, you have been warned.

Getting Started

1. Download the Repo
2. Build: cargo build --release.
3. Put the release binary somewhere where you can use it.
4. Either:
   • Use the OPML import to import your existing feed list or
   • Edit your ~/.config/rsass/feeds.toml to include the feeds you want. More on that here
5. Run rsass. Right now, this will display nothing, fetch everything, and then require you to restart rsass to read the unread entries from the DB. This will be fixed to work as expected in the future.

The feeds.toml.

The only way of configuring RSass, this is a TOML file following a simple format.

You add a feed with an entry like this:

[[feed]]
title = "A Blag on the Intertubes"
html_url = "https://blog.xkcd.com"
xml_url = "https://blog.xkcd.com/feed/"

Right now, you have to specify all keys by hand, no auto-discovery is supported. To explain the values:

• The title right now is mostly for you to name your feeds. In the future, this will also be used for display purposes.
• The HTML URL is what will be opened in a browser if you click the "open in Browser" button.
• The XML URL is what is fetched by RSass and its contents are displayed to you.

Additional niceties.

OPML import

The easiest way to try out RSass is to import an OPML bundle that you can get from Feedly or similar services. Importing your OPML to ~/.config/rsass/feeds.toml is as simple as building RSass, and running rsass import your_opml_bundle.xml. This will write to the feeds.toml where you can edit further.

Core concepts

File-based

Like many stalwarts of *nix, this is entirely controlled via a file, in this case ~/.rsass/feeds.toml. Everything is kept in this file, and you add more feeds by modifying that file.

No servers or daemons.

Feeds are fetched on startup. This may eventually change, simply because it's slow as hell.

No selective reading.

This is conceived as a "reading queue" of RSS -- You read all of it, one article after the next. There is no selection list, and it assumes that you want to consume all of the content in your RSS feeds.

Contributing

I welcome any patch to make this thing better, because I do want to use it as primary RSS reader. If you're not sure what to work on, file an issue with something that annoys you about using it, and we'll chat about the best way to fix it.

Licensed under the GPL v3.