Q: What makes NRSS better than snownews/Raggle/newsbeuter/[other reader]?
A: The interface. I don’t understand how anyone can use the three pane system. I hate the mouse. I do everything I can to get away from it. Having multiple panes to tab around and manipulate separately is crap. With NRSS, the feeds are laid out in a predefined order, each with a summary of headlines, and I can read any story I like or go to its link without any clicking or tabbing. One of the philosophies of NRSS is that it should pack the most information into a single screen without seeming crowded.
I don’t want to have to select the feed to read the headlines, and I don’t want to have to tab over and select a story to read the summary. This way I get everything in a single, concise form. I haven’t found anywhere else to get that.
Q: Does NRSS support Atom feeds?
A: Yes.
Q: Why NCurses?
A: I get a lot of questions about the “use case” that an ncurses feed reader fulfills. “What, you’re SSHed into a server and want to read news without switching windows?” Well, as I mentioned above, I hate the mouse. NCurses gives a lot of flexibility with manipulating text, without extraneous toolkit bloat. NCurses is also available (in some form) everywhere. Every distro packages it, every (Unix-like) computer has it installed.
Q: I can’t seem to get Unicode support…
A: There are a number of things that could be wrong. First, your ncurses library has to support wide chars (this should hardly ever be a problem on binary systems). Second, for complex unicode characters, your terminal has to have support. Try uxterm (which is `xterm -u8`, IIRC). If that fails, you need to make sure that the font you’re using actually has the characters in it you need. Generally, something like Unifont is what you want there (i.e. Pan-Unicode font). Of course, if all of that fails, it could perhaps be a bug.
Q: What license is NRSS under?
A: NRSS is GPLv2 software. Sometime I might get around to writing a manifesto about how open source is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Q: What platforms does NRSS run under?
A: I have personally tested NRSS under Linux (x86/amd64/ppc/ppc64) and FreeBSD (x86). The code, however, is highly portable and should have no issue moving to Linux on any platform. I have never attempted NetBSD. OpenBSD compiles (last I checked), however the code requires a lot more work before it’s functional and I’m not going to focus on it.
Q: Didn’t you used to be an OSDev guy?
A: Yes, and I still get phantom hits here for my old project Viridis . I abandoned it because it became less interesting than the Linux kernel itself, and it felt like I was doing too much work to make the invisible readers of my site happy =P.
