termnews

termnews is a small utility program that lets you read news in your terminal. It uses NewsAPI to fetch the news, and as a result, provides options for you to customize your news reading experience. For example, you can tell termnews to only fetch (say) sports, business and science related news from (say) India. It also keeps the news data updated by periodically fetching the latest news in the background to ensure that you always get the latest news. Finally, it lets you open the articles in your browser by using keyboard shortcuts (defined below)

Features

• Customizable news sources, categories and region
• Fully keyboard based navigation
• In built pagination
• Ability to open articles in your browser for a detailed read
• Periodic background updates, so you always see the latest and greatest news
• Works on multiple terminal emulators (tested on iterm, alacritty, Mac terminal)

Getting started

• Get your API key from NewsAPI
• Create config.yml at ~/.termnews/config.yml (read below to understand more, and to see examples of a few config.yml files)
• Install Go (You can skip this if you already have it)
• go get github.com/nraval1729/termnews
• Run termnews in your terminal and enjoy!

config.yml

termnews expects config.yml present at ~/.termnews/config.yml in order for it to function. This is where you can customize the behaviour of termnews. These are the configuration options currently supported:

• apiKey (required) - The API key you'll fetch from NewsAPI. They have multiple plan offerings, and while I use the free plan, you can go ahead and choose whichever plan you'd like. If you are using the free plan, please ensure that you set the refreshFrequency correctly as a courtesy to the NewsAPI team. You can read more about the API rate limits here.
• sources - This is a list of sources that termnews will use to fetch the news. You can read more about the supported sources here.
• categories - This is a list of categories that termnews will use to fetch the news. The currently supported categories are: business, entertainment, general, health, science, sports, and technology.
• country - This is a country code that will ensure termnews only fetches news associated with that country. The currently supported country codes are: ae, ar, at, au, be, bg, br, ca, ch, cn, co, cu, cz, de, eg, fr, gb , gr, hk, hu, id, ie, il, in, it, jp, kr, lt, lv, ma, mx, my, ng, nl, no, nz, ph, pl, pt, ro, rs, ru, sa, se, sg, si, sk, th, tr, tw, ua, us, ve, za
• refreshFrequency (optional) - This tells termnews about the interval to use for fetching the news. Defaults to 15 minutes. For example, a refreshFrequency of 10 tells termnews to fetch news every 10 minutes.

Note: NewsAPI requires that sources not be used when either country or categories are used.

Sample config.yml files

apiKey: <your_API_key>
sources: [hacker-news, wired, ars-technica, bbc-sport, bloomberg, google-news, google-news-in, new-scientist, techcrunch, the-next-web, the-wall-street-journal, wired]

This will tell termnews to fetch news from the above sources every 15 minutes.

apiKey: <your_API_key>
categories: [technology, business, science]
country: in

This will fetch tell termnews to fetch technology, business and science related news specific to India (in) every 15 minutes

apiKey: <your_API_key>
categories: [technology]
country: in
refreshFrequency: 5

This will tell termnews to fetch technology news in India (in) every 5 minutes

Keyboard shortcuts

• CtrlA - previous page
• CtrlD - next page
• Up Arrow - move to the previous article
• Down Arrow - move to the next article
• Right Arrow - open selected article in the browser