This manual documents Newsticker, a feed reader for Emacs. It corresponds to Emacs version 29.4.
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Newsticker provides a Feed Reader for Emacs. It retrieves headlines from a list of news sites, processes them, and provides frontends for reading and managing them. (Standard headline formats are RSS and Atom which makes Newsticker an “RSS Reader”, “Atom Reader” or “Feed Aggregator”.)
Headlines (or news items) consist of a title, (mostly) a description, and a link to the full story. The description may be a brief summary in plain text or a full HTML-formatted article. A headline may carry enclosed data such as images, audio or video files, typically in the case of so “podcast feeds”.
Newsticker downloads headlines asynchronously at configurable times, processes and stores them so that you can read them later. The list of subscribed feeds, the headline processing, the presentation of the headlines and almost all other aspects of Newsticker can be customized to your liking.
As Newsticker is part of GNU Emacs there is no need to perform any installation steps in order to use it.
Newsticker is highly customizable. All options have reasonable default values, so that (in most cases) it is not necessary to customize anything before you start Newsticker for the first time.
Newsticker downloads news periodically in the background. This is triggered as soon as you start reading news (Reading News).
Alternatively you may use the command newsticker-start
(newsticker-stop
) in order to start (stop) the periodic
download of news without opening the reader.
The following variables define which feeds are fetched and how this is done.
newsticker-url-list-defaults
¶You may select any number of feeds from this list of (sample) news feeds.
newsticker-url-list
¶All your personal news feeds are defined here. Each feed is identified by its name and an URL. You may set the start-time and the retrieval interval for each feed as well as the retrieval command arguments in case that the default values do not fit a certain feed.
newsticker-retrieval-method
¶By default Newsticker uses Emacs’s built-in download capabilities for
fetching headlines. You may change this to use an external tool like
wget
. In this case you need to set newsticker-wget-name
and possibly newsticker-wget-arguments
.
newsticker-retrieval-interval
¶The number of seconds between headline retrievals.
Newsticker assigns a status (or “age”) to each headline which you can modify manually. This makes it easy to distinguish new headlines from old ones, to keep important headlines, to hide boring headlines etc. An item is “new” when it has just arrived and has not been read. You can mark it as “old” when you have read it or – if you want to keep it – you can mark it as “immortal”. You can do that manually and you can define filters which do that automatically, see below. When a headline has vanished from the feed it is automatically marked as “obsolete” unless it has the status “immortal”. “Obsolete” headlines get removed automatically after a certain time.
newsticker-auto-mark-filter-list
¶You may define any number of filters for automatically marking newly arrived headlines as “immortal” or “old”. A filter looks for a regular expression in either the title or the description of a headline and then, if the expression matches, marks the headline as “immortal” or as “old”. This is done only once, when a headline is fetched for the very first time.
newsticker-keep-obsolete-items
¶Obsolete headlines are removed immediately unless
newsticker-keep-obsolete-items
is non-nil
in which case they
are kept until newsticker-obsolete-item-max-age
is reached.
newsticker-automatically-mark-items-as-old
¶If this is set to t
then a “new” item becomes “old” as soon as
it is retrieved a second time.
Start Newsticker with the command M-x newsticker-show-news. This will start the asynchronous news download and displays all available headlines.
Newsticker provides two different views for browsing, marking and
reading news. The variable newsticker-frontend
determines the
actual headline reader.
In this view separate windows are used for displaying feeds, headlines and their descriptions. The feeds are shown as a tree on the left hand side, headlines of the currently selected feed are shown on the upper right side, and the full contents of the currently selected headline is shown on the lower right side.
Feeds can be placed into groups, which themselves can be placed in groups and so on. This results in the tree which is displayed on the left. A node represents either a feed or a group of feeds holding a subtree. The following commands allow for managing groups.
Add a new feed group. Name of the new group and of the parent group
must be entered. If The name of the parent group is the new group
becomes a top-level group. (newsticker-group-add-group
)
Moves a feed into a group. The name of the group must be
entered. (newsticker-group-move-feed
)
The position of groups and feeds within the tree can be changed with these commands:
Shift the currently selected feed up and down within its group.
Shift the currently selected group up and down within its parent group.
The group settings are saved to a file either automatically when newsticker is being quit or manually when the following command is executed.
Save treeview group settings.
The Treeview is updated automatically as soon as new headlines have arrived.
The Treeview is used when the variable newsticker-frontend
is
set to the value newsticker-treeview
. (Alternatively it can be
started with the command newsticker-treeview
.)
In this view all headlines of all feeds are displayed in a single buffer (*newsticker*). The modeline in the *newsticker* buffer informs you whenever new headlines have arrived.
You may want to use imenu with Plainview, which allows for navigating with the help of a menu. In this case add the following to your Emacs startup file (~/.emacs).
(add-hook 'newsticker-mode-hook 'imenu-add-menubar-index)
(Note that preparing the Plainview takes significantly more time than starting the Treeview because all headlines are displayed in a single buffer. When you have subscribed to a large amount of feeds you may find that Newsticker’s efforts of minimizing rendering times, caching rendered items and so on you may find However, when you have subscribed to a large amount of feeds you may want to give the Treeview a try.)
The Plainview is used when the variable newsticker-frontend
is
set to the value newsticker-plainview
. (Alternatively it can be
started with the command newsticker-plainview
.)
Additionally, headlines can be displayed in the echo area in the style of a news ticker.
Headlines can be displayed in the echo area, either scrolling like
messages in a stock-quote ticker, or just changing. This can be
started with the command newsticker-start-ticker
. It can be
stopped with newsticker-stop-ticker
.
The following key bindings are provided in both, the Treeview as well as the Plainview.
Mark current item as old.
(newsticker-mark-item-at-point-as-read
,
newsticker-treeview-mark-item-old
).
Mark current item as immortal. Immortal items are kept forever.
(newsticker-mark-item-at-point-as-immortal
,
newsticker-treeview-mark-item-immortal
).
Open the link to the full article (as contained in the current
headline) in your web browser newsticker-treeview-browse-url
).
You can force immediate download of news with the following commands.
Get news for currently shown feed (newsticker-treeview-get-news
).
Get news for all feeds (newsticker-get-all-news
).
The command newsticker-add-url
prompts for an URL and a name of
a new feed. It then prepares a customization buffer where the details
of the new feed can be set.
Apart from automatic marking of headlines (by means of filters) Newsticker provides the possibility to fully process newly arrived headlines. Instead of reading headlines yourself you can tell Newsticker to do that for you.
In order to do so write a function which takes two arguments
the name of the corresponding news feed,
the decoded headline.
and add it to newsticker-new-item-functions
. Each function
contained in this list is called once for each new headline.
Depending on the feed name and the contents of the new headline you
can
newsticker-download-images
),
newsticker-download-enclosures
),
All Newsticker options are customizable, i.e., they can be changed with
Emacs customization methods. Call the command
customize-group
and enter ‘newsticker’ for the customization
group.
The following list shows the available groups of Newsticker options and some of the most important options.
newsticker-retrieval
contains options that define which news
feeds are retrieved and how this is done.
newsticker-headline-processing
contains options that define
how the retrieved headlines are processed.
newsticker-hooks
contains options for hooking other Emacs
commands to newsticker functions.
newsticker-miscellaneous
contains other Newsticker options.
newsticker-ticker
contains options that define how headlines
are shown in the echo area, i.e., the “ticker”.
newsticker-reader
contains options for adjusting the headline reader.
For the complete list of options please have a look at the customization buffers.
Newsticker works with the standard RSS and Atom formats listed below (being lenient with feeds which break the specifications).
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