News reader in Status Bar

News reader in Status Bar

I've searched news reader that has command-line interface, because of awesome status bar. I found newsbeuter. It's a console/ncurses-based news reader. So, I'm using mrxvt terminal emulator and my ~/.xinitrc's part:

(sleep 1 ; mrxvt -tt "News" -ht -name RSS +tr -e newsbeuter -r -u /home/zsolt/.newsbeuter/urls ) &

The -tt option set the "Tab Title" - this is the displayed title (WM_NAME). The -name option set the class to RSS so you can handle via awesome-rules (app icon, automatic tags,...). You can set the terminal's background and many other eye-candy option (see man mrxvt).

The statusbar: create a script named ~/awesome-rss (the source is here):

#!/bin/bash
UNREAD=$(echo 'select count(*) from rss_item where unread = 1;' | sqlite3 ~/.newsbeuter/cache.db)
if [ $UNREAD -eq 0 ] ; then UNREAD="No";fi
echo 0 widget_tell tb_rss $UNREAD new article

And if you have a textbox named tb_rss put this line to the ~/.xinitrc:

(while true; do /home/zsolt/awesome-resources/statusbar/awesome-rss | awesome-client ; sleep 1m; done ) &

You can insert before the tb_rss an iconbox with a rss icon...

See screenshot.