What is Canto?

Canto is an Atom/RSS feed reader for the console that is meant to be quick, concise, and colorful. It’s meant to provide a minimal, yet information packed interface. No navigating menus. No dense blocks of unreadable white text. An interface with almost infinite customization and extensibility using the excellent Python programming language.

Features

  • Atom/RSS/RDF compliant
  • Fully supports Unicode
  • Supports OPML
  • Integrated with both graphical and text browsers
  • Built in reader with full HTML parser and providing access to all links and enclosures (video/audio) in an item
  • Uses feedparser to parse virtually any feed format on Earth
  • Easily use custom filters to discard uninteresting items
  • Ability to sort feeds with custom sorts
  • Tags allow you to group items and feeds together
  • Extremely flexible and powerful theming, including the ability to add extra content (like authors, dates, upvotes, comments, etc)

11 thoughts on “What is Canto?

  1. Some feature suggestions, maybe some of them are already implemented and I didn’t notice:
    – A config menu with a option-description-value interface instead of :set, or a list of the available options with descriptions.
    – Have new entries appear at the top of the feed’s entry list (reorder the entries timewise when a new one arrives).
    – Deletion of individual entries/automatic deletion of read or old entries.
    – It would be nice if the cursor disappeared after x minutes, so no feed is highlighted when you’re not using the program.
    – a command line interface so you can query the program for updates for using it in scripts or wm integration, for example “canto-curses -new” returns 0 if there are no new entries, etc.

    Cheers :)

  2. I find canto great, but it would be slightly better if I could add two feeds with the same name. The thing is: the feeds I’m using are different, but all have the same name (the domain), so I can only add one.
    Images: http://i.imgur.com/fEgY8tR.png

    I’d be glad if this was solved. :P

    1. For either `:add` or `canto-remote addfeed` you can add name=”Feed Name” to the command to manually give it a different name.

    1. No. I’m not actively hacking on it at the moment, but I’m still using and maintaining it. Bugs and patches always welcome.

  3. Feedly! Feedly! Are there any quick tips that you can provide as to how I could get started making a patch for this? I see there’s the daemon part, and a curses part. Any info you could fill in would be appreciated.

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