Expanding the Computational Grass / 2026 Jul 17
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This morning I finally got around to trying out elfeed, the featureful
RSS feed reader for Emacs. I exported my NetNewsWire RSS subs to an
OPML file and imported that into elfeed. After about thirty minutes of
poking around I was sold. Not only does elfeed offer all the basic
features I expect from a reader, it has a very intuitive flexible
filtering system that can handle hundreds of feeds and thousands of
articles.

Still, why give up on NetNewsWire, an admittedly very well-made RSS
feed reader that I've used for well over 20 years? Well that gets to
the heart of the matter. There isn't really anything wrong with
NetNewsWire. It's a perfectly good app that does one thing and does
that one thing very well. But that is exactly the issue. The
relationship /between/ UI applications (regardless of operating system
choices) has hardly advanced since Apple introduced the
Macintosh. Copy/pasting media and reliable drag/drop between
applications, sure, but there has to be more interesting forms of
synergy.

Probably the single greatest idea to gain popularity due to graphical
user interfaces is the hyperlink. Yet to this day, desktop
applications remain largely unaddressable. And the web largely being
overrun by capitalist interests, chatbots, and ne'er-do-wells is
unlikely to ever really fulfill the hypermedia promise.

Compare this to one of my very favorite features about Emacs
org-capture.  org-capture lets you quickly make a note of something
while you're in the middle of something else. The important thing is
that you can configure the capture template so that your note has a
link.

Configuring the capture template is succint:

  (setq org-capture-templates
        '(("n" "Note" entry (file+olp+datetree "/path/to/notes.org")
           "* %?\nEntered on %U\n  %i\n  %a")))

%? is new org-mode aheading, %U is a timestamp, %i will be the selected
text and %a will be the automatically inserted link.

If I'm in an email in Gnus and jot down a note, I get a link to the
email I was reading. Of course it works if I'm browsing the web with
EWW, but also if I'm browsing a Gopher hole or a Gemini capsule
in Elpher. It works if my cursor is on a file in Dired. It works if
I'm looking at a TODO item in Org. It works if I'm in a buffer in
Magit. It works from a Libera.Chat channel in ERC. And now with
elfeed, it works while I'm reading BoomKat record reviews. If I don't
get a sensible link from wherever I am making a quick note, that's
surprising!

The point is that a text editor kept moving forward in time while
the rest of world froze in place some four decades ago.

Anyways, one obvious thing missing from elfeed was keeping my feed
state shared between machines. I started wondering if SDF offered any
solutions. I gave a quick search on the wiki and discovered SDF runs a
Tiny Tiny RSS instance and MetaArray users can request a login. So I
did.

After getting a password and logging into my account, configuring Tiny
Tiny RSS was very easy. Figuring out how to connect elfeed with
elfeed-protocol so that I could use ttrss was a bit more work.

  (use-package elfeed
    :defer t
    :ensure t
    :config
    (require 'elfeed-protocol)
    (setq elfeed-use-curl t
          elfeed-feeds
          '(("ttrss+https://swannod@rss.sdf.org"
             :password (my/authinfo-pass "rss.sdf.org" "swannod"))))
    (elfeed-protocol-enable)

  (advice-add 'elfeed-feed-autotags :around #'my/feed-autotags))

my/authinfo-pass is just a trivial wrapper around auth-source-search
which will find a particular entry in .authinfo for you.

The only thing that's weird here is that I had to hack around the fact
that I want to use the elfeed-tree view and that doesn't quite work
out of the box with elfeed-protocol.

Now I have a RSS reader that works the same on NetBSD and MacOS and
I don't need iCloud to do it.

Thanks SDF!