Taking a Look at Feeds, a Minimalist RSS Reader

While email is my social media, I get a lot of my information via RSS. That includes news, opinion, blog posts, and more.

Lately, I’ve been using NewsFlash as my main desktop feed reader. But when I was testing NewsFlash, I also tested a couple of others in parallel. One of those was Feeds, a minimalist RSS feed reader for the GNOME desktop.

Here’s what I discovered about it.

Getting Feeds

The easiest way to do that is through your distribution’s software centre. If your distro of choice uses GNOME as its desktop environment, it’ll be there.

You can also install it as a flatpak or install feeds on Arch Linux, Fedora, or Debian. If you want or need to embrace your inner geek a bit, you can grab the source code for Feeds and compile it yourself.

Using Feeds

Here’s what Feeds looks like when you start it up:

For obvious reasons, the cupboard of RSS feeds is bare. You can add a feed using its URL by clicking the + button in the header bar and then pasting the link to a feed. Or, if you have a set of feeds that you exported from another feed reader, you can click the stacker menu, select Import OPML, and then find the OPML file (which contains information about feeds that a reader can use) to pull in.

I did the latter, using an OPML file that I saved from NewsFlash. Depending on the number of feeds in the file, it can take anywhere upwards of 30 seconds to import all items. When the import finishes, Feeds looks something like this:

And here’s what an article in Feeds looks like when you read it:

Reading Modes

Feeds is very compact. It has two panes — a list of feeds (with newest displaying at the top) on the left and the rendered article on the right.

What you’re seeing in the image above is one of Feeds’ View Mode. That one is called Reader Mode, which renders the web page associated with the feed without all of the cruft like banners, additional images, comment blocks, and the like. It’s reminiscent using a read-it-later application such as Omnivore.

You can change how Feeds displays articles by clicking the View Mode icon at the top of the article pane, like so:

Then, from the list that displays selecting either Web View (which displays the web page associated with the feed, also with all the cruft):

Or Feed Content, which displays the content of the feed:

Feed Content mode doesn’t always work; sometimes the feed is truncated, displaying only the first few lines or the first couple of paragraphs.

Viewing Categories

When you import a file of RSS feeds, that brings over categories (assuming you have some), which group types of feeds together. When I use an RSS reader for example, I group all of the science publications I follow are in the category Science.

That said, the articles list isn’t broken down by categories. It’s more of a big list of articles, with newest ones at top. To view your categories (or just the entries in individual feeds), you need to click the Filter button in the header bar and then select a category. Here’s an example:

While Feeds does this, I assume, to keep the application window compact, I’m kind of partial to having my feeds grouped by subject matter and in front of me. I just don’t like having to click through to see my categories.

Changing Your Preferences

To do that, click the stacker menu and select Preferences. This window displays:

There are four tabs:

• General, which controls how Feeds behaves — for example, whether to open links in an article in an external browser, how to handle video in a feed, and how and how often to refresh your RSS feeds.
• Privacy, which does what it says on the label. I found that you can stick with the out-of-the-box settings.
• Appearance, where you can change (to a point) the look and feel of Feeds — for example, use light or dark mode, whether image thumbnails appear in the article list, and which font to use.
• Advanced, which I ignored, mainly because I wasn’t sure what anything on that tab does.

Final Thoughts

While I prefer NewsFlash, I do have a soft spot for feeds. It’s compact. It’s easy to use. It’s a solid choice if your needs around an RSS reader are simple.

— Scott Nesbitt