Configuring Newsbeuter

I’ve recently talked about using Newsbeuter and it has been interesting for me because of how focused I am on reading whatever content I get online through it. However, knowing that I need to somehow fix some things so I could work better with it, I decided to make a config file that does that.

My needs are mainly for saving articles in one spot, indicating which browser to use and indicating where podcasts must be saved. I am still happy with the keyboard shortcuts that are available by default and the colors look good in my eyes. But it’s faster if I could configure the other settings

For Newsbeuter, you just need to make a config file in ~/.newsbeuter called “config” Yes, it’s as simple as that so you could easily remember where it is the next time you want to tweak it.

We could take a look at the sample config file on the Newsbeuter help:

# a comment
max-items 100 # such comments are possible, too
browser links
show-read-feeds no
unbind-key R
bind-key ^R reload-all


The ones on the left side are the things to be customized and the ones on the right, or after a tab, are the settings of your choice. For my needs, it’s actually simple:


browser firefox
download-path ~/Podcasts
player mplayer
save-path ~/Documents/FeedArticles


You need to look at the table of configuration commands that you could tweak.

One more thing I like about Newsbeuter is that it does have a counterpart for managing your podcasts. For example, I have a list of podcast feeds in Newsbeuter and I have selected to ‘enqueue’ some of the episodes (done by pressing ‘e’) then I could run “podbeuter” on another terminal and view the list of enqueued files. I could toggle the download of all these files on Podbeuter. Podbeuter is included when you install Newsbeuter and it really is meant for managing your podcasts. It will also use the same config file as Newsbeuter’s so there’s no need to worry about that.