chapter-firststeps.txt

After you've installed newsbeuter, you can run it for the first time by typing
"newsbeuter" on your command prompt. This will bring you the following message:

	Error: no URLs configured. Please fill the file /home/ak/.newsbeuter/urls with RSS feed URLs or import an OPML file.

	newsbeuter 2.10
	usage: ./newsbeuter [-i <file>|-e] [-u <urlfile>] [-c <cachefile>] [-x <command> ...] [-h]
		-e, --export-to-opml            export OPML feed to stdout
		-r, --refresh-on-start          refresh feeds on start
		-i, --import-from-opml=<file>   import OPML file
		-u, --url-file=<urlfile>        read RSS feed URLs from <urlfile>
		-c, --cache-file=<cachefile>    use <cachefile> as cache file
		-C, --config-file=<configfile>  read configuration from <configfile>
		-X, --vacuum                    compact the cache
		-x, --execute=<command>...      execute list of commands
		-q, --quiet                     quiet startup
		-v, --version                   get version information
		-l, --log-level=<loglevel>      write a log with a certain loglevel (valid values: 1 to 6)
		-d, --log-file=<logfile>        use <logfile> as output log file
		-E, --export-to-file=<file>     export list of read articles to <file>
		-I, --import-from-file=<file>   import list of read articles from <file>
		-h, --help                      this help

This means that newsbeuter can't start without any configured feeds. To add
feeds to newsbeuter, you can either add URLs to the configuration file
$HOME/.newsbeuter/urls or you can import an OPML file by running "newsbeuter -i
blogroll.opml". To manually add URLs, open the file with your favorite text
editor and add the URLs, one per line:

	http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
	http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml

If you need to add URLs that have restricted access via username/password, simply
provide the username/password in the following way:

	http://username:password@hostname.domain.tld/feed.rss

In order to protect username and password, make sure that
$HOME/.newsbeuter/urls has the appropriate permissions. Newsbeuter also makes
sure that usernames and passwords within URLs aren't displayed in its user
interface. In case there is a '@' in the username, you need to write it as 
'%40' instead so that it can be distinguished from the '@' that separates the 
username/password part from the hostname part.

You can also configure local files as feeds, by prefixing the local path with
"file://" and adding it to the $HOME/.newsbeuter/urls file:

	file:///var/log/rss_eventlog.xml

Now you can run newsbeuter again, and it will present you with a controllable
list of the URLs that you configured previously. You can now start downloading
the feeds, either by pressing "R" to download all feeds, or by pressing "r" to
download the currently selected feed. You can then select a feed you want to
read, and by pressing "Enter", you can go to the article list for this feed.
This works even while the downloading is still in progress.  You can now see
the list of available articles by their title. A "N" on the left indicates that
an article wasn't read yet. Pressing Enter brings you to the content of the
article. You can scroll through this text, and also run a browser (default:
lynx) to view the complete article if the content is empty or just an abstract
or a short description. Pressing "q" brings you back to the article list, and
pressing "q" again brings you back to the feed list. Pressing "q" a third time
then closes newsbeuter.

Newsbeuter caches the article that it downloads. This means that when you start
newsbeuter again and reload a feed, the old articles can still be read even if
they aren't in the current RSS feeds anymore. Optionally you can configure how
many articles shall be preserved by feed so that the article backlog doesn't
grow endlessly (see "max-items" below).

Newsbeuter also uses a number of measures to preserve the users' and feed
providers' bandwidth, by trying to avoid unnecessary feed downloads through the
use of conditional HTTP downloading. It saves every feed's "Last-Modified" and
"ETag" response header values (if present) and advises the feed's HTTP server
to only send data if the feed has been updated by modification date/time or
"ETag" header. This doesn't only make feed downloads for RSS feeds with no new
updates faster, it also reduces the amount of transferred data per request.
Conditional HTTP downloading can be optionally disabled per feed by using the
"always-download" configuration command.

Several aspects of newsbeuter's behaviour can be configured via a configuration
file, by default $HOME/.newsbeuter/config. This configuration file contains
lines in the form "<config-command> <arg1> ...".  The configuration file can
also contain comments, which start with the '#' character and go as far as the
end of line. If you need to enter a configuration argument that contains
spaces, use quotes (") around the whole argument. It's even possible to
integrate the output of external commands into the configuration. The text
between two backticks ("\`") is evaluated as shell command, and its output is
put on its place instead. This works like backtick evaluation in
Bourne-compatible shells and allows users to use external information from the
system within the configuration. Backticks can be escaped with a backslash
("\`"); in that case, they'll be replaced with a literal backtick in the
configuration.

Searching for articles is possible in newsbeuter, too. Just press the "/" key,
enter your search phrase, and the title and content of all articles are
searched for it. When you do a search from the list of feeds, all articles of
all feeds will be searched. When you do a search from the article list of a
feed, only the articles of the currently viewed feed are searched. When opening
an article from a search result dialog, the search phrase is highlighted.

The history of all your searches is saved to the filesystem, to
\~/.newsbeuter/history.search. By default, the last 100 search phrases are
stored, but this limited can be influenced through the "history-limit"
configuration variable. To disable search history saving, simply set the
history-limit to 0.