This is made for Summer of Making 2025! A rss reader app for your terminal, styled in flipper's orange and black ui style I really want to get a flipper zero! And im only like 300 shells short!
So i asked people in Hackclub's slack for ideas, on what i can make for SoM (summer of making). And Youssef gave an idea to make an app with Textual. So here i am!
The project uses Python 3.11.4, Textual and a Venv python virtual enviroment
Textual draws clickable and interactable User Interfaces inside your terminal with symbols! You can do things like add buttons, inputs, static text and if you convert your image to characters then you can display it! Learn more on Textual wiki: https://textual.textualize.io/
And i wonder, if you know... how it works! - probably kanye east
As i said previously, i use Textual. It's really a great library. But some feeds return HTML content. And as you have guessed: it isn't easibly readable for us humans, and we arent horses, we are humans.
So how do i go around this? Well it's actually pretty easy (if you don't count in regex i hate regex with all of my hearth)
I just use the html2text library! Then i can write pretty simple (again not counting regex) methods to parse html into pretty text
First we need to write a main class for html parsing, it initiates the parser and says what to parse, heres it:
class ParseHTML(HTMLParser):
def __init__(self):
super().__init__()
self.text = []
self.in_tag = False
def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
if tag in ['br', 'p']:
self.text.append('\n')
elif tag in ['h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'h5', 'h6']:
self.text.append('\n## ')
elif tag == 'a':
for attr, value in attrs:
if attr == 'href':
self.text.append(f'[')
break
def handle_endtag(self, tag):
if tag == 'a':
self.text.append(']')
elif tag in ['p', 'div']:
self.text.append('\n')
def handle_data(self, data):
self.text.append(data.strip())
def get_text(self):
return ''.join(self.text)Not much right? Yeah i think so
Now important thing is we ont use it directly, it just makes changes to the HTMLParser from html
We then use the HTML2Text in code from html2text. Now i dont really understand fully how this all works, classes are like dark magic for me. But they work!
Because it's a pain in the butt to do so. WHy? Images are big, like very big 1080x1920 pixel, that's 2073600 in total!!!!! And the terminal (textual library) can draw pixels as text or unicode color blobs or something i dont remember honestly. all of what i say may be wrong so dont really use what i say as a guide okay? So to draw an image we need a lot of pixels, that we dont have. Now there are workorounds but theyr hard to do etc etc. I can always convert an image to be 40x40 pixels which is much smaller, but that means we lose all the details and probably you wouldn't be even able to recognise what it was before pixelifying
A rss feed, any rss feed. as long as it doesnt use buss:// protocol or something It can have HTML inside it, but only basic nothing crazy. Yeah that's about it
Firts let's go throught the basics: What Is RSS?
RSS - [ereses]: Really Simple Syndication -or- RDF Site Summary
It's a simple protocol to provide short snippets for sites/news sites/blogs whatever you want tbh. I guess it could be even made into some sort of api response? Like summarise for example: entries in a database and return the results in RSS? Will probably look into something like this.
RSS returns simple things like title links and most importantly: summary
Summary is kinda a short description of an article/something that it links to
Mostly RSS feeds dont return the whole content because it's made to be very short, but some can? idk prob
A lot of sites use rss! Here are some of the examples! -- built into rsstui --
- TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/feed.xml
- NYT Global: https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/World.xml (has feeds for different subpages but not all)
- Reddit!: All sub-reddits have rss feeds, just add
.rssto the end of the link like https://www.reddit.com/r/JDVancePics.rss UPDATE: Reddit feeds seem to have a really really small limit on rss requests, so they dont work reliably - And other! like https://theverge.com/rss.xml https://xkcd.com/rss.xml
It's pretty cool huh?
PyPi is a great service to host python scripts and packages. Here's how to install it:
First u need to create some sort of folder for my app and activate the venv
mkdir rsstuiThen activate env
python3 -m venv venvAnd
source venv/bin/activateNote: If u use fish then add .fish to the end of the command so it looks like: source venv/bin/activate.fish
Now there's easy part
pip install rsstuiAnd then run
rsstuiCongrtats u so smart
Want to contribute or run from source? Here's how:
The app was written on Linux Mint. Python enviroment was installed with pyenv [link to github], which is a very good way to manage Python versions, it even supports custom python compilers, check it out!!!
Alright Here is how: First clone the repo onto your computer
git clone https://github.com/yehorscode/RssTUI RssTUI[Optional] If you have a pyenv enviroment i highly reccomend to install 3.11.4 with this command (takes 2-4 mins)
pyenv install 3.11.4Then cd into your folder
cd RssTUIAnd if you have pyenv activate your 3.11.4 installation with
pyenv shell 3.11.4Remember how i mentioned venv? It is a virtual enviroment you need to activate it
Bash:
source venv/bin/activateFish:
source venv/bin/activate.fishCsh:
source venv/bin/activate.cshNow all that's left is install Textual
pip install -r requirements.txtWait some time for it to finish, then you can run the app with:
python3 rsstui/app.pyJust use WSL, learn how to install and use it: Microsoft docs link For using it inside wsl PLEASE use Windows Terminal and not cmd or powershell consoles. Wundows Terminal is a standalone app but it works a lot better then the other ones + looks very cool see microsoft windows terminal documentation
I have never owned ANY mac device, so i do not know how does it know, and how to activate enviroments, sadly i can't reccomend anything. BUT BUT BUT the Linux methods may work. Please try them! Use bash methods In theory mac os and linux both use unix, so installing the app should work right out of the box and maybe even with the auto installer
If installed via PyPi just run
rsstuiIf u did it with the manual masochist method do:
python3 rsstui/app.pySimple and clean! 🚀
I really want to get the flipper zero, i would develop apps for it and have lots of fun learning how pentesting works. Thanks! If u have issues just find me