Automatically open specific feed after startup

[AndreiUlmeyda]

Óla,

I am in the process of becoming a user, greatly enjoying it so far. But I've hit a bit of a wall when trying to customize the feed list. My goal is to not display a feed list at the top level but rather a unified list of articles gathered from all feeds. The reason being that I perceive entering and exiting feeds as overhead and that, most of the time, I can not decide what to read next solely using the info displayed in the feed list. I've tried query feeds and filters in all combinations I could think of, but every time the result is a top level list containing a single feed (the one I have queried or filtered) that contains the original feeds, which contain the respective articles.

Is such a flat list a use case as of yet? If so I would appreciate a nudge in the right direction :D

Cheers

[AndreiUlmeyda]

Little update: Contrary to my statement, when using a query feed it contains the list of articles, not a list of gathered feeds. So that's almost there. A way to make it the feed opened by default (and/or hiding the other feeds) would be the last thing needed. Hiding the feeds is a bit fiddly with lots of imported, nameless, urls that would need to be supplied with "~title". But nothing a script can't handle.

[Minoru]

Hi,

Newsbeuter doesn't support this (yet). There are two solutions that are quire close:

• use query feeds (as you describe);
• open an article and then use next and next-unread (J and n by default). This won't give you a list of all articles, but rids you of necessity to exit articles and feeds to find a next one.

I'm not entirely sure what I think of the overall idea—it feels a bit contrary to Newsbeuter's nature. I'll keep it for now, though.

Related: #41

[AndreiUlmeyda]

Thanks for the quick answer,

the concepts is, now that I think of it, actually the most intuitive one for me by far, but I noticed I might be alone on this one while googling and finding next to nobody else bringing something like it up. Pathological news preferences of mine are probably my mums fault for watching fox news during pregnancy. For the same reason I don't quite grok why you perceive it as contrary to the intent of the program, although I guess it is because I am trying to hide most feeds? That would basically just be a hack on the way to the flat list and the information about the feed source would still reside next to the article.

In essence, I need to see all articles at a glance and do two thing really fast and with few strokes (optimally the key ones):

1. dismiss a good portion of them, for instance hit key -> have it vanish (not necessarily deleted) from the list.
2. plan my order to read them based on the headline/source feed of all (of the recent ones) of the articles and read/open them in that preferred order while, also, making them disappear from the list through every command that implies I start reading them (open, most of the times).

So I'm still just using it as a news aggregator/reader, am I right? startstogetnervous

Anyhow, the query feed will probably do the trick for now and the ticket you kindly opened would add to the experience. Another thing I noticed just now was that there seems to be a key binding "open-and-mark-read" (or something similar) but none for just "mark-read" leaving me with the desired behaviour when I open an article but not when I dismiss one. There is one for "delete-article" but that will not automatically hide the article as soon as the button is pressed. O the joys of catering to everyones use cases.

Cheers

[AndreiUlmeyda]

Oops, I thought you opened another issue but it was just renamed, undoing premature closing of the issue. I would suggest you close it, though. If nothing else is to add

[Minoru]

I don't quite grok why you perceive it as contrary to the intent of the program

As I said, I'm not entirely sure myself. Can't yet put my finger on it. My first feedreader was Google Reader, which too had one giant list of articles by default, and it seemed fine at the time. Now that I use Newsbeuter, I find it equally fine to use n if I'm not interested in specific feed/tag/whatever. Dunno.

dismiss a good portion of them, for instance hit key -> have it vanish (not necessarily deleted) from the list.

If you set show-read-articles, you can just mark articles read and they'll disappear. (See also toggle-show-read-articles.)

plan my order to read them based on the headline/source feed of all (of the recent ones) of the articles and read/open them in that preferred order

If your preferred order happens to be supported by article-sort-order, you're covered. If you need something custom, open a separate issue and we'll discuss it there.

making them disappear from the list through every command that implies I start reading them (open, most of the times)

show-read-articles no + configuring those commands to mark articles read. (Take a look at out macro facility.)

Another thing I noticed

…is better be reported separately in the future. It's really hard to keep track of ideas when there's more than one per issue.

there seems to be a key binding "open-and-mark-read" (or something similar) but none for just "mark-read" leaving me with the desired behaviour when I open an article but not when I dismiss one.

There's toggle-article-read (bound to N by default.)

There is one for "delete-article" but that will not automatically hide the article as soon as the button is pressed.

That's a feature. Helps with undeleting things. See also purge-deleted ($ by default.)

Please read the manual.

I would suggest you close it, though. If nothing else is to add

This is not the first time this question pops up. I'm going to keep this issue around and eventually close it either through implementing something or explaining why nothing will be changed.

[AndreiUlmeyda]

If your preferred order happens to be supported by article-sort-order

I know of the ordering feature but usually do not try to capture the highly arbitrary order in which I end up reading things with an algorithm. I just mentioned it to illustrate why I try to have a list of articles rather than a list of feeds.

If you set show-read-articles, you can just mark articles read

I knew of show-read-articles and turned it off from the start. What I was missing was toggle-read with N. I did read the manual, several passes of most parts in fact (as evidence I present to you the typo ...Please note taht... in the section "Dialog Titles" near the very end. :cambodia:, cambodia indeed), but it is still not small enough a document to have all blind spots rooted out quickly ;). Thank you for mentioning that shortcut.

show-read-articles no + configuring those commands to mark articles read

...is what I tried to to and was just confused for a while. The first time I marked something read this way it disappeared at key press, which was how I liked it. But, after using it a bit, I think articles are hidden at the next reload (or some other operation that happens every few minutes), which is functionally nearly equivalent and I will have gotten used to in a few days.

It's really hard to keep track of ideas when there's more than one per issue

Naturally. I will try to be more concise and help keep issues separated if I can help it.

Cheerio

[Minoru]

the typo ...Please note taht... in the section "Dialog Titles" near the very end

That's already fixed, but thanks nonetheless.

I think articles are hidden at the next reload (or some other operation that happens every few minutes)

Deleted articles are hidden when you quit the feed. I don't recall any other operation that exhibit such behaviour. If you experience this and documentation doesn't say that it should be this way, open an issue. Better be safe than sorry.

[AndreiUlmeyda]

Deleted articles are hidden when you quit the feed. I don't recall any other operation that exhibit such behaviour.

Pretty sure by now that articles displayed in a query feed being marked as read are hidden on auto-reload. Gonna act as advised and open an issue.

[dustinkirkland]

I, too, have been trying to figure out how to do this, all evening :-) My use case, is that I want to use a couple of window splits in tmux, each running their own copy of newsbeuter -u, each pane tuned into its own feed. Any help would be much appreciated!

[dustinkirkland]

One simple approach would be logic that says, if there's only one feed url, then by golly, just open that. No need to sit there waiting for the user to hit enter, and select the only feed in the list.