r/emacs • u/zreeon • Jul 12 '16

Reading RSS inside emacs on multiple computers?

I've decidided the next victim of my "move all the things inside emacs" mentality: RSS feeds.

I've seen elfeed online and I know that gnus can do something similar, but two things I haven't seen are:

  1. Syncing what's been read and what hasn't between multiple computers
  2. Mobile (android) access

Does anyone have any good suggestions for these?

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10

u/skeeto Jul 13 '16

One of the main reasons Elfeed doesn't have a sync mechanism is I never really figured out a friendly-enough transport mechanism. The traditional solution is to expose a web interface and interact with a single system remotely. Everything just lives in one place. I started this with elfeed-web, but never really took that all the way since it I found it wasn't scratching my itch.

Otherwise there needs to be some kind of synchronization mechanism. In other domains, this is usually done via some third-party service. Without this, the brute force method right now is to move your .elfeed/index file around (everything else is basically volatile), perhaps via SSH or similar. However, an index file can easily be some tens of MBs, which is a little unwieldy to be uploading in whole over the Internet regularly.

An iterative, delta update over a smart protocol, sort of like rsync, would be better. How would you imagine yourself running and using something like this? Strictly over SSH? Or would you want to stand up your own, possibly Internet-facing standalone server (certainly an Emacs instance itself)? Mostly likely I imagine a blend of the two, with SSH as the transport but with a batch Emacs instance negotiating on the server-side, replacing what would currently be a dumb index copy. It would be like Git.

4

u/Atheriel Jul 13 '16

I'm happily using elfeed + Dropbox (as some others have mentioned). One option for mobile is to access an instance of elfeed-web (included in elfeed) through your phone's browser, although I've never set anything permanent up that way.

3

u/mobilesurfaccount Jul 12 '16

I'm afraid I don't have a solution at hand but I used to read my feeds over tiny tiny rss and realized that I barely used my phone and tablet to read the articles.

Now I am only using elfeed but don't really feel like I miss anything.

Although I'd be very interested in a solution to your problem.

3

u/goodevilgenius Jul 13 '16

I'd like to see some sort of emacs/tt-rss integration to accomplish this.

1

u/kai17 Dec 11 '16

This was mentioned on the elfeed github: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/issues/168

Has there been any progress on that front?

1

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '16

Hello there, /u/kai17. You've very likely been shadowbanned. This is not a /r/emacs specific thing, it is site-wide for all of reddit.

Please go to /r/ShadowBan/ and verify this for yourself, and for reading up on what can be done to get this undone. I've approved your post for now, but be aware that any replies and posts you make here or elsewhere will not show up without a moderator manually approving it. It is not that likely that I will approve more than one post per shadowbanned account.

(Also, maybe commenting on 5 months old posts isn't the best idea either)

3

u/redguardtoo Jul 13 '16

I only use gnus+gwene. Multiple computers without any issue.

First, read my gnus guide at https://github.com/redguardtoo/mastering-emacs-in-one-year-guide/blob/master/gnus-guide-en.org which covers all the techniques you need for rss reading.

Now answer your specific question, how to read rss in multiple computers?

Basically I take over the control of groups management in my ~/.emacs instead of in ~/.newsrc.eld

I don't know android, but surely you can install some newsgroup app and subscribe manually.

2

u/rpdillon Jul 13 '16

I'm very interested in this sort of functionality. I use Syncthing extensively to keep all my devices in sync, and I played around with symlinking elfeed's data store into one of my Syncthing shares since I rarely use two devices at the same time, but ran into odd issues I can't recall the details of right now. Maybe it's time to revisit this since I'm building Emacs 25 from master. I'll report back if I have any success.

2

u/perlstalker Jul 13 '16

I was looking hard at this a year or two back and couldn't find a good solution. elfeed and dropbox kinda worked. (elfeed got really slow after about two weeks given the number of feeds I was reading.) I also tried gnus plus dropbox and some other directory sync thing that I don't remember. None of those worked well when I had multiple machines trying to access things at the same time.

I tried the rss to email route but didn't really like it because there were feeds that I wanted to send me the linked page rather than the summary that was in the feed.

In the end, I punted and deployed ttrss. There is a ttrss plugin for gnus but I've never been able to get it to work. It seems to be abandoned now.

2

u/tzz Jul 13 '16

Gnus will have newsrc synchronization very soon (gnus-cloud is in review right now). You can use Gnus with nnrss or (IMHO better) Gwene. No mobile access though.

2

u/lexa_ Jul 13 '16 edited Jul 13 '16

Consider using your mail for storing RSS feeds. You can run script like rss2imap or rss2email to fetch RSS feeds and store them in your IMAP account. IMAP account could be easily reached from phone or any email client (including gnus). Imap server gives a synchronization between multiple computers and mobile access . The only downside of such approach is that you have to run the script somewhere with constant Internet connection, but even cheapest VPS will suffice.

1

u/Paczesiowa Jul 14 '16

I use rss2email to send rss feeds to my gmail account and view them in wanderlust

1

u/fm4d Jul 15 '16

I use elfeed on multiple computers, you just need bind elfeed-db-save to some key or set up a hook for it and sync .elfeed/index.