Alternatives to Newsboat
Terminal RSS and Atom reader with heavy keyboard control. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Newsboat
Terminal RSS and Atom reader with heavy keyboard control.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Newsboat.
Newsraft
Small terminal feed reader with section-based navigation.
Newsraft is a smaller, faster terminal reader using sections instead of query expressions, with a smaller feature set and community than Newsboat.
sfeed
Suckless RSS and Atom parser that outputs plain text.
sfeed is a tiny ISC-licensed C parser that outputs plain text for Unix tools, so you assemble your own reading workflow and lose sync support.
nom
A terminal RSS feed reader with a simple TUI, Vim-style keys and Markdown-styled articles.
nom is a terminal reader with Vim-style keys, Markdown-rendered articles and Miniflux and FreshRSS backends, though not open source.
Elfeed
An extensible web feed reader for GNU Emacs supporting Atom, RSS and JSON Feed.
Elfeed is a public-domain feed reader inside GNU Emacs, extensible in Emacs Lisp, so it requires Emacs rather than a plain terminal.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Newsboat as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Liferea
GTK desktop feed reader for Linux with offline reading.
Newsboat is a terminal reader for macOS and Linux with query feeds, macros and back-end sync, but renders no images or rich content.
RSS Guard
A desktop feed reader that also logs into Feedly, Inoreader and self-hosted readers, and plays podcasts.
Newsboat moves reading into the terminal with query feeds, macros and back-end sync, but renders no images or rich content.
russ
A terminal RSS and Atom reader written in Rust with vim-style controls and offline storage.
Newsboat is an MIT-licensed terminal reader with query feeds, macros and sync with several reader back ends, at the cost of a configuration file to learn.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
FreshRSS
A self-hosted feed reader that is light enough to run on a cheap shared host and still handles hundreds of feeds.
Miniflux
A deliberately minimal feed reader: one Go binary, a PostgreSQL database, and no options you do not need.
Tiny Tiny RSS
Long-running self-hosted news aggregator with plugins and filters.
rss-bridge
Generate feeds for websites that do not publish them.
