Newbie experience

[Daniel Brandes]

Hello there,

I'm looking into migrating my subscriptions from TB to newsboat – it looks like a very elegant solution to me.

Since I've accumulated pretty massive reading material, I'm wondering whether there are any limitations, handling-wise or technical lags, to be expected?

Will run in tmux/iTerm on OSX.

Thanks a lot for your work and any insight!

Daniel

[Alexander Batischev]

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Hi, and sorry for the delayed reply!

On Mon, Nov 24, 2025 at 02:20:37PM +0100, 'Daniel Brandes' via newsboat wrote:
>I'm looking into migrating my subscriptions from TB to newsboat – it
>looks like a very elegant solution to me.
>
>Since I've accumulated pretty massive reading material, I'm wondering
>whether there are any limitations, handling-wise or technical lags, to
>be expected?

First of all, how do you plan to migrate the data? Newsboat supports
OPML, but that only contains feed URLs, titles, and tags. The actual
articles, their read/starred status, and other metadata can't be easily
moved. If you're handy with programming and can get the data out of your
previous reader, you *could* write a script to put it into Newsboat's
database (it's SQLite), but this is an undertaking :)

Second, the biggest performance problems with now are with big
databases. Newsboat becomes a memory hog[1] and takes a while to
start[3]. If you delete items after reading them, and especially if you
don't run Newsboat for weeks on end, these problems won't affect you at
all. I don't recall if memory problem is specific to Linux; perhaps it
won't affect you on macOS; either way, it can be ameliorated by
compiling with a different memory allocator[3].

1. https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/977
2. https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/766
3. https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/3210

Third, depending on how you use the feedreader and what you need out of
it, you might find some functionality lacking. I don't know what it'll
be, I guess (and hope :) we'll see once you start using it. The only
real limitation here is that we don't want to make Newsboat scriptable,
so don't expect to control it programatically or do stuff unrelated to
reading RSS/Atom feeds.

That's about it.

>Will run in tmux/iTerm on OSX.

Should work fine. I run it under tmux on Linux, and we've had tickets
and contributions from macOS users, so you aren't alone.

Hope you're still interested in trying Newsboat even though it took me
more than a month to reply. Check out 2.42, it just came out a few days
ago :)

- --
Regards,
Alexander Batischev

PGP key 356961A20C8BFD03
Fingerprint: CE6C 4307 9348 58E3 FD94 A00F 3569 61A2 0C8B FD03

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