tsipinakis
commented
7 years ago I have a similar workflow, my newsbeuter feeds are basically divided into two big sections, there is low volume stuff I read most of(podcasts, blogs etc) and high volume news that get a crazy amount of articles each day, and I also stumbled on this same problem when I first started using newsbeuter.
How I solved it is that I defined a macro that toggled mark-as-read-on-hover and every time I want to go through my high volume feed I turn that on and simply scan the titles, opening up what I find interesting along the way. The one problem that I have with this is that I sometimes forget to turn it off and if I decide to go into one of my low volume feeds with that on without noticing I mark things I actually want to read as read.
I asked on IRC yesterday if there was a way to change the color scheme with a macro in an attempt make it more apparent when mark-as-read-on-hover is on but apparently there isn't.
That said, I see two problems with this suggestion:
- One, I'm not sure how much I like that in your example that if I don't want to read something, it stays marked as unread. I use the unread count in feeds as an indicator of how much stuff there is to go through and how long it would take me to either read through the titles for high volume feeds or go through each article for stuff I want to read. With the unread number growing, that indicator becomes sort of meaningless since you are never actually going to go back and read all of them. So I think a bit of clarification is needed here since currently the
unreadflag holds all the weight in the feedlist and itemlist(Nindicator, title becomes bold and the unread count is represented as a number in the feedlist). One might suggest to reduce the importance of the unread flag would be a solution, but while it would fit perfectly the high volume workflow, the unread flag is what matters in low volume feeds when you actually want to look at most posts. - And second, there are many times when I go into a feed without wanting to act on new articles but I am simply searching for something I saw before, or want to check post dates and so on and so forth. Having a flag that is constantly updated on hover would quickly become a nuisance since when I go back I am not sure if something was marked as seen because I accidentally highlighted it while doing other things or because I actually saw it earlier.
Minoru
timkuijsten
I haven't looked at the code yet, but I was wondering if an "unseen" attribute would be welcome and feasible without too much refactoring. A feature that is a bit like the O(ld) status flag in mutt. The use case is as follows:
When following a lot of feeds (like 200+) most articles pass by unread. With only an "unread" attribute it's a bit of a sport to quickly skim through new articles, especially with high volume feeds like the ones from news sites. One way to keep track of which titles are new and which you have already seen is to systematically mark all articles as read after reading the titles (and possibly articles, of course). Since not all articles are read, this feels like a tedious and repeating workaround. Furthermore you loose the ability to keep track of what you've actually read.
A possible fix would be to introduce an "unseen" attribute. While in the feed list and whenever new articles have been fetched in the background, a
Uwould appear next to theNto indicate new unseen articles are available for that feed[1]. The attribute would be cleared automatically as soon as the user opens the article list of that feed and sees all the new titles. The new titles in the article list should be marked on first sight (i.e.Uor a bold typeface) until you open the article or quit that list and go back to the feed list.This way it doesn't require any manual intervention or bookkeeping to keep track of the articles you haven't seen before, like constantly marking everything as read.
Example feed list:
This would mean
When opening Feed D the U flag in the feed list of Feed D is cleared. The article list of Feed D could look like:
This means that all articles are unread, but only article 1 and 2 are new since the last time this article list is shown. As soon as an article is openen it's N and U flag are cleared, but the U flag of all the articles are cleared as well as soon as this view is closed and the user navigates back to the feed list.
Hope this is clear :)
[1] Of course there are multiple ways to visualize this, maybe it would be more clear to print the feed title in bold or give it another color instead of printing a U left of it's name.