I like a good, well-designed and visually appealing website as much as the next guy, but more and more often, I find myself turning to RSS feeds to cut through the clutter and distraction.

I host an instance of FreshRSS locally on my desktop. When I’m away from home, I like to use a decidedly different mobile setup via two different apps in Termux. Having two different types of RSS feeds really gives me well-rounded and heavily curated/customizable content for my daily reading.

But since I have a long commute, I wanted to find a way to have a more streamlined experience using only my Android phone, so I turned to two CLI apps on Termux: lynx and newsboat to curate a better RSS feed.

Credit: niroworld/Shutterstock.com

Reading on the modern Internet can be a nightmare for folks who want fewer ads, distractions, AI slop, and ridiculous autoplay videos.

RSS feeds can help smooth out the experience a bit, but not all RSS readers or feeds are created equal. Some websites don’t have RSS feeds or only provide a snippet that leads back to the website itself.

Broken code, like messed-up feed markup or outdated XML, can be a problem for RSS feeds. Intentional restrictions on the website itself can also cause the feed not to work properly or just totally fail. Sometimes, the links change, or maybe there’s a captcha or login that can’t be bypassed when grabbing the feed.

That’s why using a dedicated text-based browser with an RSS app made perfect sense to me. Everything I did in Termux on Android was performed on a Motorola Moto G and a Samsung Galaxy ZFold 5.

A simple, text-based browser for a clean web experience

Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek

As a kid, I often spent considerable time at my local library. I lived in a small town, and the library hadn’t yet upgraded its computers to an OS with a graphical web browser like Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

Instead, it had a text-based search engine that may or may not have been WebCrawler (I’m working from memory here, so the details are a bit spotty; I don’t recall what OS the library was using at the time). I loved that search engine, spending many hours exploring the NES webring and reading about Dungeons & Dragons or plants.

Nostalgia is likely what drew me to the text-based Lynx browser, but I stayed for the reading experience, customization, and its integration into newsboat.

Lynx is actually one of the oldest text-based browsers that’s still actively maintained. I like it for easy reading with no images or distractions if I’m checking out a new story or trying to learn something new, or testing out a website.

I’ve also found it to be less cluttered and much easier on my vision, so I’ve been using it more often, especially with RSS feeds during my commute.

You can install it on Termux using pkg install lynx

Free, open-source, and easy setup make this one a keeper

Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek

I’m a huge fan of newsboat when I read my RSS feeds most days. Discovering it was like learning a shortcut for a better online experience. I knew immediately that it would change how I use RSS feeds.

I switched to newsboat because I was frustrated with incomplete feeds and clutter. When I began using newsboat, most of the feeds I added to my urls file, surprisingly enough, provided the full content of the page. This was exactly what I was looking for, but as I added more feeds, I ran into several sites that only loaded teasers or snippets, which is what I expected. For the ones that only loaded snippets, I configured newsboat to open all my links in lynx. After that, I just selected the full article link, and it opened up in lynx with a nice and clean text-only article for me to read.

Aside from that, you can customize newsboat and use it for podcast RSS, although I have not experimented with that particular feature yet (but it’s on my list). newsboat isn’t limited to RSS feeds, either. You can load ATOM feeds as well.

You can install it on Termux using pkg install newsboat

An few commands in Termux gives you a full RSS feed

By using a simple notes file, you can quickly set up your feed

Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek

Get started by installing both newsboat and lynx.

Newsboat will not work until you configure your urls file, which is just a text file containing all the urls for your feeds.

You can make a directory for newsboat using mkdir -p ~/.newsboat Then you need to make a configuration file. I use nano as my default text editor in the terminal using the command nano ~/.newsboat/config. This is where you can change the color, set up auto-refresh, and tweak the settings to your heart’s desire.

Then, you need to populate your feeds using nano ~/.newsboat/urls You’ll be returning to this one often as you add and remove feeds. In the file, you just type or paste the URL of the sites you want. That’s it. It’s best to go for the actual RSS feed when available. It’ll usually look something like this:

https://website.com/RSS

As I mentioned before, some sites don’t have a typical feed, and others might not work at all. RSS isn’t foolproof, even with a program like newsboat. On my Android device (a Motorola Moto G), lynx is set as the default browser for newsboat on its own. I did not have to enter a command to set it up that way, but it may vary on your device, so double-check that when you do your setup.

If the full text of an article doesn’t appear in newsboat, hit o to open it in lynx. I use / key to search for a word in the title so it’ll take me straight to the start of the article itself. The arrow keys do the rest, while the space bar goes to the next page. It takes some gettings used to, but I’ve found I prefer it over most graphics-based browsers on my phone (desktop is a totally different story).

If you want to import your feeds from an OPML file, you can. newsboat is compatible with OPML files, which use newsboat -i ~/mycoolrssfeeds.opml (obviously, you’ll want to substitute the name of your file for my placeholder) to import them.

The arrow keys, navigator, and different letter keys (listed at the bottom of the screen) let you read, reload feeds, or quit the app. After that, enjoy navigating your favorite sites in a distraction-free environment on your own device.

The Internet doesn’t have to be a cluttered experience

Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek

When you’re sick of clutter and distraction, it’s nice to have an option for something a bit simpler. If you know your way around Termux and are comfortable with CLI apps on Android, you’ll probably get a lot of value from using newsboat and lynx together.

While I wouldn’t recommend using lynx for everything you do online, it’s been absolutely amazing for catching up on news, journals, magazines, and fun stuff.

And all it took was an old Android phone, a terminal, and a couple of simple yet powerful apps to get there. Perhaps I’ll set it up on a Kindle or Fire Tablet next.