tuxwire

A calm, terminal-style RSS reader that runs in your terminal and on your Android phone. Follow the sites you care about, save articles, add your own notes, and keep it all on your own server if you want it to follow you between devices.

No accounts, no ads, no tracking. Free software under the MIT licence.

Install · Google Play · F-Droid (coming soon) · Source on GitHub

tuxwire in the terminal: topics on the left, articles on the right, a key legend below — the terminal version, with topics on the left and articles on the right

What it does

Feeds by topic. Group RSS and Atom feeds into topics you choose, then browse topic, source, article.
Save and add notes. Keep an article with your own note, and export everything to one Markdown file.
Read later. Stash a link now, decide later.
Import and export. Move your feed list in or out with OPML.
Themes. Eight built in on the desktop, with live switching.
Optional sync. Off by default, to a CouchDB server you run yourself.

On the desktop

Keyboard driven. Enter reads an article, s saves it, n adds a note.

reading an article inside the terminal with w3m — reading an article without leaving the terminal (needs w3m, otherwise it opens in your browser)

the saved view with a note preview under the article — the saved view, with a note preview under the article

On your phone

A native Android app with the same look. The bars are pinned top and bottom so everything sits under your thumb.

the Android feed list grouped by topic — feeds, by topic

a saved article with a note on Android — saved, with notes

the Stats tab on Android — reading stats

How they connect

Both apps are built on one shared Rust engine, so they behave the same. Turn on sync and they also share your saved articles and notes through a CouchDB database on your own server. Save something on your phone, find it in the terminal.

  tuxwire (terminal) <─────>  your CouchDB  <─────> tuxwire (android)
                          (optional, your server)

  both built on tuxwire-core, one engine written in Rust

What travels: saved articles, notes and read-later links.
When: when you ask it to, never in the background.
Who sees it: only you. Nothing is sent to me.

Install

Android

Get it on Google Play. F-Droid is coming.

Terminal

Fedora COPR and Arch AUR packages are coming. Until then, build it from source.

Install Rust, then a C toolchain:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source "$HOME/.cargo/env"

# C toolchain, pick your distro
sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config     # Debian, Ubuntu
sudo pacman -S base-devel pkg-config            # Arch, CachyOS
sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"       # Fedora

Build it:

git clone https://github.com/shanecuster/tuxwire.git
cd tuxwire
cargo build --release

Put it on your path and run it:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -s "$(pwd)/target/release/tuxwire" ~/.local/bin/tuxwire
tuxwire

The first build takes a few minutes. Optional: install w3m to read articles inside the terminal.