What is Newsboat used for?

Newsboat is a terminal RSS and Atom feed reader, an actively maintained fork of Newsbeuter with filters, meta-feeds, macros and bookmarking scripts. It is a good fit for reading feeds over SSH or in a terminal and filtering high-volume feeds.

Is Newsboat open source?

Yes. Newsboat is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at newsboat/newsboat and is written mainly in C++.

Yes. Newsboat is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

What is Newsboat an alternative to?

Newsboat is an open-source alternative to Feedly. Other open-source alternatives to Feedly include Yarr, FreshRSS and NewsBlur.

Is Newsboat actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Newsboat was on 26 September 2026. The project has 3.9k stars on GitHub.

Newsboat: open-source alternative to Feedly

About Newsboat

Newsboat is an RSS and Atom feed reader for the text console, maintained as a fork of Newsbeuter. A feed reader pulls updates from sites such as blogs and news agencies and lets you read them in a single interface, often with the full text, so a browser may not be needed.

Notable features include a built-in HTML renderer for text-only entries, bookmarking scripts that send links or whole articles to other services, filters based on title, author or content, and meta-feeds that aggregate articles by arbitrary criteria. Feeds can be transformed before they reach Newsboat, macros run sequences of actions with two keystrokes, and there is rudimentary podcast support.

It integrates with services like The Old Reader, NewsBlur and FeedHQ. Newsboat is written in C++ and Rust, licensed under MIT, and builds with GNU Make, a C++17 compiler, stable Rust, STFL, SQLite3 and libcurl. Downloads and documentation are on newsboat.org.

Key features

Terminal RSS and Atom reading
Built-in HTML renderer
Filters by title, author and content
Meta-feeds aggregating articles
Feed transformations before display
Macros for repeated actions
Sync with The Old Reader and NewsBlur
Rudimentary podcast support

Good fit for

→Reading feeds over SSH or in a terminal
→Filtering high-volume feeds

Built with: C++
Tags: rss; atom; feed-reader; terminal; cli; newsbeuter; podcasts; cpp

Newsboat: questions and answers

What is Newsboat used for?: Newsboat is a terminal RSS and Atom feed reader, an actively maintained fork of Newsbeuter with filters, meta-feeds, macros and bookmarking scripts. It is a good fit for reading feeds over SSH or in a terminal and filtering high-volume feeds.
Is Newsboat open source?: Yes. Newsboat is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at newsboat/newsboat and is written mainly in C++.
Is Newsboat free?: Yes. Newsboat is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
What is Newsboat an alternative to?: Newsboat is an open-source alternative to Feedly. Other open-source alternatives to Feedly include Yarr, FreshRSS and NewsBlur.
Is Newsboat actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Newsboat was on 26 September 2026. The project has 3.9k stars on GitHub.