Newsboat is my RSS feed reader. It allows me to check the websites I am interested in quickly and without distraction. I have been able to create macros that keep me on the command line from videos to mp3s to actual articles. There is one small glitch in all this, sites that only include a description of the articles in the RSS feed and force you to go to the website to read the whole article.

At this point there are two options. The first being using a command line web browser to read the article and scrolling through pages of menus and ads to find the actual article. The second being leaving the command line and reading the article in Firefox's reader mode.

Now there is a third option using Readability CLI to read articles in "Firefox's reader mode" on the command line.

Readability CLI by gardenappl using Mozilla's Readability library to strip a web page to the core content. The result being a simplified HTML document which can be viewed by any browser.

I created a two line bash script that is called by a Newsboat macro key that ties together Newsboat, Readability CLI, and Lynx.

#!/bin/sh  
readable $1 > /tmp/readablearticle.html
uxterm -e lynx /tmp/readablearticle.html

The first line after the #!/bin/sh has readable, the executable for Readability CLI download the url provided by Newsboat, convert it to, using Mozilla's Readability library, a HTML file with just the core content, and finally save the new file in the tmp directory. The second line opens an xterm terminal and executes the opening of the HTML file with Lynx.

Readability CLI can be found at GitLab

A Video, by Brodie Robertson, of Readability CLI in action

Zettelkasten ID newsboatmeatsreadable-2020-08-14-1545