photon - RSS reader as light as a photon with terminal + sixel
NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION OPTIONS USAGE GENERAL ARTICLE VIEW MEDIA EXTRACTION KEYBINDINGS CARD VIEW ARTICLE VIEW SEARCH LUA PLUGINS SEE ALSO AUTHORSNAME
photon - RSS reader as light as a photon with terminal + sixel
SYNOPSIS
photon [OPTION] [<paths> ...]
DESCRIPTION
photon is a RSS/Atom reader with the focus on speed, usability and a bit of unix philosophy. It shows the items in a card grid, with one selected card. User can then scroll through it, read the article, play media or open in default application. For extending functionality lua plugins can be used. photon also can dynamically load opencl for image scaling.
OPTIONS
[<paths> ...]
RSS/Atom urls, config path, or - for stdin
-h, --help
Show context-sensitive help.
--extractor
command for media link extraction item link is substituted for % env: PHOTON_EXTRACTOR Default: yt-dlp --get-url %
--video-cmd
set default command for opening the item media link in a video player media link is substituted for % direct item link is substituted for $ if no % or $ is provided, photon will download the data and pipe it to the stdin of the command env: PHOTON_VIDEOCMD Default: mpv $
--image-cmd
set default command for opening the item media link in a image viewer media link is substituted for % direct item link is substituted for $ if no % or $ is provided photon will download the data and pipe it to the stdin of the command env: PHOTON_IMAGECMD Default: imv -
--torrent-cmd
set default command for opening the item media link in a torrent downloader media link is substituted for % if link is a torrent file, photon will download it, and substitute the torrent file path for % env: PHOTON_TORRENTCMD Default: mpv %
--article-mode
the default article view mode env: PHOTON_ARTICLE_MODE Default: ARTICLE
--article-renderer
command to render the item.Content/item.Description env: PHOTON_ARTICLE_RENDERER Default: w3m -T text/html -dump -cols 72
-b, --cookie=KEY=VALUE;...
sets the cookie of all outgoing http requests
-H, --header=KEY=VALUE;...
sets the headers of all outgoing http requests
-A, --user-agent
sets the User-Agent header of all outgoing http request
-k, --insecure
(TLS) By default, every SSL connection photon makes is verified to be secure. This option allows photon to proceed and operate even for server connections otherwise considered insecure
--download-path
the default download path Default: $HOME/Downloads
-t, --terminal-title
set the terminal title
-r, --refresh=SECONDS
refresh interval in seconds env: PHOTON_REFRESH Default: 0 (doesn’t automatically refresh)
USAGE
GENERAL
photon’s philosophy is to be a some kind of rss viewer. So it doesn’t have features like adding or managing feeds. photon can be started with a list of urls:
$ photon https://static.fsf.org/fsforg/rss/news.xml https://itsfoss.com/feed/ https://blog.golang.org/feed.atom?format=xml
Or it can be directly fed with the feed data:
$ curl -s https://www.reddit.com/r/pics.rss | photon -
Or using ratt and playing magnet links directly with mpv:
$ ratt auto https://1337x.to/top-100 | photon -
Or searching youtube using ratt(1):
$ ratt auto https://www.youtube.com/results --data-urlencode="search_query=MyQuery" | photon -
Or it can parse a config file (see photon(5)):
$ cat
mychannels.txt
#youtube - LunusTechTips
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=LinusTechTips
#youtube - Rob Braxman Tech
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCYVU6rModlGxvJbszCclGGw
#odysee - Lunduke on Tech" > mychannels.txt
https://lbryfeed.melroy.org/channel/odysee/@Lunduke:e
$ photon mychannels.txt
Or it can call a external command, must be specified with the cmd:// prefix:
$ echo
"cmd://ratt auto
https://videoportal.joj.sk/slovania" >>
mychannels.txt
$ photon mychannels.txt
By default running photon with no arguments will try to read ~/.config/photon/config
So the feed management is up to the user with arguments, text files and creating scripts like:
$ cat
photon-reddit.sh
photon mysubreddits.conf
$ cat mysubreddits.conf
https://www.reddit.com/r/popular.rss
https://www.reddit.com/r/news.rss
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny.rss
https://www.reddit.com/r/memes.rss
ARTICLE VIEW
By pressing ENTER, photon will show the article view, where it scraps the card’s link and extracts the title, top image and main text content. The article view also has three modes:
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ARTICLE - shows the scrapped article content |
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• |
DESCRIPTION - shows the item.Description |
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CONTENT - shows the item.Content |
Article view in DESCRIPTION or CONTENT mode, can use a external tool to render the text. By default w3m is used, but can be changed with the --article-renderer argument, or PHOTON_ARTICLE_RENDERER environment variable.
OSC8 links are supported, so every link in article can be opened with the terminal withouth needing to select the url and article view can show just the text of the link and not the url.
MEDIA EXTRACTION
photon can extract the direct media link of the rss item. Media extraction is by default done by yt-dlp. By the content type of the media, photon will run it in either a video player (default mpv) or a image viewer (default imv). If the link is a magnet link, or a torrent file, photon will run it in a torrent downloader/player (default mpv with the webtorrent-mpv-hook script).
KEYBINDINGS
CARD VIEW
h move selected card to the left
j move selected card down
k move selected card up
l move selected card to the right
CTRL+- will decrease the number of columns of cards.
CTRL+= will increase the number of columns of cards.
ENTER will show the article view
p will play the media link
r refresh feeds
o will open the card’s link in the default web browser (or default application).
yy - copy card link to clipboard
dm - download media
dl - download link content
di - download image
CTRL+d - scroll half screen down
CTRL+u - scroll half screen up
CTRL+f - scroll full screen down
CTRL+b - scroll full screen up
gg - go to the first line
G - go to the last line
q - exit the application
ARTICLE VIEW
m circle trough article view mode
yy copy article link
o open article in the browser
j scroll the article down
k scroll the article up
CTRL+d scroll half screen down
CTRL+u scroll half screen up
CTRL+f scroll full screen down
CTRL+b scroll full screen up
gg scroll the article to the top
G scroll the article to the bottom.
q or Esc close the article.
The standard view of urls of your terminal can be also used (CTRL+SHIFT+U)
SEARCH
Searching is done with pressing / and then typing the query. photon will filter the visible cards by finding the query in either the card’s title, description, feed’s title.
LUA PLUGINS
photon will automatically load lua scripts from ~/.config/photon/plugins/*.lua
These plugins help to extend the functionality and make photon do whatever the user needs. Lua plugins can subscribe for events or register new keybindings and modify the state. To see the entire photon lua plugins tutorial please see photon-lua(7)
SEE ALSO
photon(5), photon-lua(7)
AUTHORS
Maintained by VladimÃr Magyar <[email protected]>. Up-to-date sources can be found at https://sr.ht/~ghost08/photon and bugs/patches can be submitted by email to ~ghost08/[email protected]