Chaski – modern RSS and Atom feed reader

Following websites individually soon becomes a chore. RSS readers bring updates together, making it easier to keep up with busy news sites and catch occasional posts from quieter blogs.

Chaski is a graphical RSS and Atom feed reader designed to provide a calm, uncluttered environment for keeping up with websites and other feeds. The application is built with Rust, Tauri and React. It places a strong emphasis on privacy, with no advertising or telemetry, while offering features such as offline reading, full-text search, feed discovery, notifications and configurable filters.

Chaski can operate with local accounts but is not restricted to purely local feed storage. It also supports Google Reader API-compatible services including FreshRSS, Miniflux and Tiny Tiny RSS. OPML import and export makes it straightforward to migrate an existing collection of feeds.

Installation

Chaski’s developers provide ready-built Linux packages. For my evaluation, I used Ubuntu 26.04 and CachyOS.

For Ubuntu, I downloaded the project’s DEB package from its code repository. It’s installed with the command:

sudo apt install ./Chaski_0.7.0_amd64.deb

Using apt rather than dpkg has the advantage that any required dependencies can be resolved automatically.

There isn’t a native Arch package among the upstream release assets, so I used the AppImage on CachyOS. However, it failed to start normally.

Running it with the following command got it working:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libwayland-client.so.0 ./Chaski_0.7.0_amd64.appimage

In Operation

The program has a simple wizard that lets you choose your theme and add RSS accounts.

To start, I’ll add a few feeds. Click the + icon in the title bar.

The UI is fairly substandard in general, with lots of annoyances. Worse, the interface makes reading articles unnecessarily difficult. For example, the default font doesn’t look particularly clear on either Ubuntu or CachyOS. The software also doesn’t handle links in articles well.

The software organises feeds into accounts and folders, and there’s support for multiple accounts. Notifications for new entries are handy.

The software also has a discovery page for finding new feeds, but it’s not worth using in its current state.

Summary

Chaski has a reasonable feature set for anyone who wants a modern desktop application for following RSS and Atom feeds. Local accounts cover straightforward standalone use, while support for FreshRSS, Miniflux and Tiny Tiny RSS broadens its usefulness for people who already run a feed synchronisation service.

I’m not comfortable with Chaski’s handling of article content. Rather than limiting itself to the content supplied by the RSS or Atom feed, Chaski fetches the complete web page and extracts the full article. That may be convenient for the reader, but it also bypasses the publisher’s decision to provide only a summary in the feed, along with analytics, comments, donation links and other elements of the original site. I’d prefer full-article fetching to be an explicitly optional feature rather than the default behaviour.

Chaski is still a relatively young project. The developer describes the codebase as being at an early stage and acknowledges that it does not yet have proper test coverage.

There are many more polished RSS readers available for Linux. See the table below.

Website: github.com/a-chacon/chaski-app
Support:
Developer: Andrés
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

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

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