Elfeed: Using emacs for reading RSS

2 minute read

In last years I have been using Emacs for almost all my daily tasks:

  • Reading my emails (using mu4e).
  • Creating the slides for my courses using org-beamer.
  • Using dired to navigate for the file system).
  • Publishing this blog (using Hugo and ox-hugo).

The last thing to integrate into emacs is reading blogs and news from RSS files. Adding elfeed and elfeed-org I was able to create RSS. elfeed-org is very simple, it allows to add the feeds as items in org-mode:

- Blogs                                                              :elfeed:

  - https://www.meneame.net/rss                                  :news:portada:
  - https://www.meneame.net/rss?status=queued                            :news:
  - http://planet.emacsen.org/atom.xml                                :emacs:
  - https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/.rss                     :programming:
  ...

The tags for each feed will be shared for all articles.

Then, loading elfeed, it can be obtained a screen showing the different articles:

And selecting an article, it can be open, read and open each link by the default browser.

Several opinions about elfeed:

  • It is very simple to use.

  • The use of tags is very powerful, not only they received the tags from the category, and you can add a tag to an article.

  • The search filter is simple and very powerful, you can filter both for date and for tags.

  • The search filter can be kept as bookmark, so using C-x r b it can be seen the article using a particular filter.

To summary, elfeed has been a great discovery. If you use emacs, give it a try.