👽 Alien News Feed

A customizable, terminal-based news reader that aggregates articles from your favorite subreddits. Stay up-to-date with the latest news without ever leaving your terminal.

Features

• Multi-Profile Management: You can create, rename, delete, and switch between different user profiles. Each profile can have its own unique list of subreddits and a separate database, keeping your "Work" and "Hobby" news feeds completely separate.

• Live Reddit Feed: Fetches the latest articles from any combination of subreddits (e.g., news+worldnews+technology).

• Clean Terminal UI: A smooth, keyboard-driven interface for browsing articles with multiple themes.

• Customizable Theming: The application supports multiple color schemes (like Solarized, Nord, Dracula+) to change the look and feel of the interface.

• Persistent Storage: Uses an SQLite database to store articles, keeping track of read, new, and bookmarked items between sessions.

• In-App Comment Viewer: Read Reddit comment threads directly within the application in a collapsible tree view.

• Content Curation:

  • Site Filtering: Block unwanted sites on-the-fly from the action menu.
  • Blocklist Management: Manage a persistent list of excluded domains in the settings menu.

• Filtering and Searching

  • Toggle a "bookmarks-only" view
  • Search your entire article history for keywords.

• Flexible Actions:

  • Open articles or comment threads in your default web browser.
  • Instantly summarize any article with links to Perplexity AI.
  • Archive a page on archive.is, copy its URL, or block its domain.

• Advanced Data Management:

  • Full Backups: Export and import the entire article database.
  • Bookmark Export: Export all your bookmarked articles to a clean, styled, and portable HTML file.
  • Command-Line Tools: Perform headless backup and restore operations without launching the UI.

• Article Management:

  • Bookmark articles to read later and filter the view to show only bookmarks.
  • Live search with a two-stage process for both typing and navigating results.

• User-Friendly:

  • An in-app help screen provides a quick reference for all keybindings.
  • Cross-platform support for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Installation

The easiest way to get started is to visit our releases page. I'll be updating reguarly with milestone releases as needed.

For the rest you need Python 3.6+ to run this script.

1. Clone the repository (or download the script):

   git clone https://github.com/oldlamps/AlienNewsFeed.git
   cd AlienNewsFeed
   
   
   

2. Install the required dependency: The script requires the requests library to fetch data from Reddit's API.

   pip install requests
   pip install pid
   
   
   

Usage

Interactive Mode

Navigate to the project directory and run the script to launch the interface:

python alien.py

The first time you run it, a configuration file (config.ini) and database (news_feed.db) will be created automatically in your system's user config directory:

• Linux/macOS: ~/.config/AlienNewsFeed/
• Windows: %APPDATA%\AlienNewsFeed\

Keybindings

Key(s)

Action

↑ / ↓ Move selection up/down one article.

← / → Page up/down by 10 articles.

Enter Open the Action Menu for the selected article.

b Bookmark or un-bookmark the selected article.

c View comments for the selected article.

v Toggle the Bookmarks view.

/ Enter Search mode to filter articles.

s Open the Settings menu.

h Open the Help/About screen.

ESC Go back, exit a menu, or quit the application.

Advanced Search

The search function uses a two-stage process:

1. Press / to start typing your query.
2. Press Enter to "commit" the search. This shifts focus to the filtered list, allowing you to use all navigation keys (↑/↓) and action keys (b, c, Enter) on the results.
3. Press / again to re-focus the search box to edit your query.

Command-Line Mode

The application supports headless operations for easy scripting and backups.

• Export a full backup:

  python alien.py --export
  
  
  

  This will save a timestamped backup of your database to the backups folder and exit.
• Import from a backup:

  python alien.py --import /path/to/your/backup.db
  
  
  

  This will prompt you with a warning. If you confirm, it will overwrite your current database with the backup file and then launch the application.

Configuration

You can customize the application by editing the config.ini file located in the configuration directory.

• Theme: Set your preferred color theme (e.g., Dracula).
• FetchInterval: Time in seconds between background fetches for new articles.
• Subreddits: A + separated string of subreddits to pull from.
• ShowClock: true or false to toggle the clock display.
• BlockedDomains: A comma-separated list of domains to exclude from the feed (e.g., badnews.com,another-site.net).

A restart is required for changes to FetchInterval and Subreddits to take effect.

Clipboard Support 📋

The "Copy URL to Clipboard" feature relies on external command-line utilities.

• Windows (clip.exe) and macOS (pbcopy): The necessary tools are included with the operating system by default.

• Linux (xclip): This tool is often not installed by default. If the copy feature isn't working, you'll need to install it using your distribution's package manager.

  • Debian / Ubuntu / Mint:

    sudo apt-get install xclip

  • Fedora / CentOS / RHEL:

    sudo dnf install xclip

  • Arch Linux:

    sudo pacman -S xclip