Please note: The informations on this page are obsolete. The newsticker.el project at savannah is not maintained anymore. Newsticker is part of GNU Emacs. Please refer to GNU Emacs for the latest version of Newsticker and for up-to-date documentation.

newsticker.el - A Newsticker for Emacs.

Overview

Newsticker provides a newsticker for Emacs. A newsticker is a thing that asynchronously retrieves headlines from a list of news sites, prepares these headlines for reading, and allows for loading the corresponding articles in a web browser.

Headlines consist of a title and (possibly) a small description. They are contained in "RSS" (RDF Site Summary) or "Atom" files.

Newsticker should work with the following RSS formats:

as well as the following Atom formats:

Atom 0.3
Atom 1.0

That makes Newsticker.el an "Atom aggregator", "RSS reader", "RSS aggregator", and "Feed Reader".

Newsticker provides several commands for reading headlines, navigating through them, marking them as read/unread, hiding old headlines etc. Headlines can be displayed as plain text or as rendered HTML.

Headlines can be displayed in the echo area, either scrolling like messages in a stock-quote ticker, or just changing.

Newsticker allows for automatic processing of headlines by providing hooks and (sample) functions for automatically downloading images and enclosed files (as delivered by podcasts, e.g.).

Newsticker is part of GNU Emacs (Version 22 and up).

Screen shots

Here are screen shots of version 1.99 and some older screen shots: version 1.8, version 1.7 version 1.6, version 1.5, version 1.4, version 1.3, version 1.0.

Requirements

Newsticker can be used with GNU Emacs version 21.1 or later as well as XEmacs. It requires an XML-parser (`xml.el') which is part of GNU Emacs. If you are using XEmacs you want to get the `net-utils' package which contains `xml.el' for XEmacs.

Newsticker retrieves headlines either via Emacs' built-in retrieval functions, by an arbitrary external program that retrieves files via http and prints them to stdout (like wget, or – on a per feed basis – via an arbitrary Lisp command.

Installation

If you are using GNU Emacs 22 or later you can skip this section – newsticker is already installed on your system.

Place Newsticker in a directory where Emacs can find it. Add the following line to your Emacs startup file (`~/.emacs').

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/newsticker/")
(autoload 'newsticker-start "newsticker" "Emacs Newsticker" t)
(autoload 'newsticker-show-news "newsticker" "Emacs Newsticker" t)

That's it.

Usage

The command newsticker-show-news will display all available headlines. It will also start the asynchronous download of headlines.

You can choose between two different frontends for reading headlines:

Newsticker's treeview uses separate windows for the feeds (in tree form), a list of headlines for the current feed, and the content of the current headline. Feeds can be placed into groups which itself can be placed in groups and so on.
Newsticker's plainview displays all headlines in a single buffer, called ‘*newsticker*’. The modeline in the ‘*newsticker*’ buffer informs whenever new headlines have arrived.

In both views clicking mouse-button 2 or pressing RET on a headline will call browse-url to load the corresponding news story in your favourite web browser.

The scrolling, or flashing of headlines in the echo area, can be started with the command newsticker-start-ticker. It can be stopped with newsticker-stop-ticker.

If you just want to start the periodic download of headlines use the command newsticker-start. Calling newsticker-stop will stop the periodic download, but will call newsticker-stop-ticker as well.

Configuration

All Newsticker options are customizable, i.e. they can be changed with Emacs customization methods: Call the command customize-group and enter ‘newsticker’ for the customization group.

All Newsticker options have reasonable default values, so that in most cases it is not necessary to customize settings before starting Newsticker for the first time.

The following list shows the available groups of newsticker options and some of the most important options.

newsticker-retrieval contains options that define which news feeds are retrieved and how this is done.
- newsticker-url-list defines the list of headlines which are retrieved.
- newsticker-retrieval-method defines how headlines are retrieved. This is either done using Emacs' built-in download capabilities or using an external tool.
- newsticker-retrieval-interval defines how often headlines are retrieved.
newsticker-headline-processing contains options that define how the retrieved headlines are processed.
- newsticker-keep-obsolete-items decides whether unread headlines that have been removed from the feed are kept in the Newsticker cache.
- newsticker-auto-mark-filter-list provides the possibility to automatically mark headlines as immortal or old.
newsticker-hooks contains options for hooking other Emacs commands to newsticker functions.
- newsticker-new-item-functions allows for automatic processing of headlines. See `newsticker-download-images', and `newsticker-download-enclosures' for sample functions.
- The subgroup newsticker-plainview-hooks contains hook which apply to the plainview reader only.
newsticker-miscellaneous contains other Newsticker options.
newsticker-ticker contains options that define how headlines are shown in the echo area, i.e. the “ticker”.
- newsticker-ticker-interval and newsticker-scroll-smoothly define how headlines are shown in the echo area.
newsticker-reader contains options for adjusting the headline reader.
- newsticker-frontend determines the actual headline reader. The “plainview” reader uses a single buffer, the “treeview” uses separate buffers and windows.
- The subgroup newsticker-plainview contains options for the plainview reader.
- The subgroup newsticker-treeview contains options for the treeview reader.

For the complete list of options please have a look at the customization buffers.

Remarks

Byte-compiling newsticker.el is recommended.

License

newsticker.el is published under the GNU General Public License V3 or later.

Project

The newsticker.el project is hosted at http://savannah.nongnu.org. Here is its project page: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/newsticker/. Please note that newsticker's development now takes place directly in Emacs CVS repository. The repository at savannah will not be updated regularly.

Download

Please visit the download page at Savannah for downloading the stable version and the Texinfo manual. The latest stable version is 1.99 (as of 2008-10-13).

Author

Newsticker is written and maintained by Ulf Jasper