bulletty – TUI RSS/Atom feed reader

A news aggregator gathers news, blog posts, and other web content into one place, making it easier to follow updates from many different sources. Given the huge number of news sites and blogs online, these tools are invaluable for quickly spotting important developments and breaking stories.

They’re especially useful for people who follow lots of blogs, as they remove the hassle of checking each site individually. That’s particularly helpful when some blogs are updated only occasionally.

Bulletty is a terminal-based RSS and Atom feed reader that stores articles locally as Markdown. It supports offline reading while keeping subscriptions, highlights, and comments under your control.

Installation

CachyOS is now the Linux distribution I use for most of my software evaluation.

bulletty is available in the official Arch repositories. I installed the program using pacman. Installation was trouble-free.

$ sudo pacman -S bulletty

There are other ways of installing the software if you’re not using an Arch-based distro.

In Operation

When you first launch the program, your library will be empty, so you will need to add some feeds. This must be done from the command line, as there is no option to add feeds within the application itself. That is a glaring omission.

For example, to add our feed:

$ bulletty add https://www.linuxlinks.com/feed

bulletty has one of the most attractive TUIs I’ve seen in a terminal feed reader. Categories and feeds are displayed in the left pane, with unread counts clearly shown. The main pane lists articles together with their date, author, and description.

Keyboard navigation is fast and intuitive. Read/unread status is persistent, articles can be marked for Read Later, and pressing ? displays shortcuts relevant to the current screen.

The embedded Markdown reader is excellent. Articles are cleanly presented, the reading width can be adjusted, and n and p move directly between articles. Press o to open an article in your web browser.

But bulletty’s standout feature is how it stores data. Subscriptions and downloaded articles are kept locally under ~/.local/share/bulletty/.

Articles are ordinary Markdown files arranged in directories. This is a superb design. The library is transparent, easy to back up or synchronize, and accessible with standard Linux tools and text editors.

Feeds are added from the command line. bulletty can discover feeds from website URLs and supports OPML import and export. There’s also an excellent selection of themes.

The biggest omission is search or some sort of filtering. A program capable of accumulating thousands of Markdown articles really needs built-in search.

Full-text extraction is also absent. If a feed only provides a short summary, that’s all the embedded reader can display. Feedr’s ability to retrieve and extract the complete article is a major advantage.

There’s no configurable periodic background refresh, and feed and category management is largely restricted to the command line. I’d also like highlighting, notes, configurable keybindings, image support, and authenticated feeds.

Summary

bulletty combines a polished TUI and excellent Markdown reader with a wonderfully transparent local data model. Storing downloaded articles as ordinary Markdown files is a superb idea.

Search and full-text extraction are the major omissions. Add those features and bulletty would rank fairly high among the finest terminal feed readers available.

Website: github.com/CrociDB/bulletty
Support:
Developer: Bruno Croci
License: MIT License

bulletty is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Linux has lots of terminal-based news aggregators. If bulletty doesn’t meet your requirements, try one of these.