my textmode workflow
====================

i thought i'd share my recent findings since i've been switching to textmode.
i've been using offpunk[1] for anything http, gopher and gemini related.

newsboat with elinks
--------------------

for anything rss/atom related i've found newsboat[2] is better suited to my own
needs. i'm willing to accept to that i might be using the offpunk subscribe 
feature[3] incorrectly, but newsboat feels more intuitive.

i've been using a combination of elinks' [4] image viewer handler and wslview 
to allow me to view images (or open a graphical browser) in newsboat. here's
what the config looks like

```
# $HOME/.newsboat/config
browser "elinks %u" # requires some mime handling too
macro w set browser "wslview %u"; open-in-browser ; set browser "elinks %u"
```

if you use "open browser" elinks will trigger, alternative (, + w) will trigger
wslview which should open your default graphical browser.

tip: if you're a wsl user, you can also use this to handle external browser 
usage in offpunk. just add `handler text/html wslview %s` to your offpunkrc

and to configure mime correctly in elinks

```
# $HOME/.elinks/elinks.conf
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix.ask = 0
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix.block = 1
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix.program = "$HOME/.newsboat/scripts/image_pager.sh %"

set mime.extension.jpg="image/jpeg"
set mime.extension.jpeg="image/jpeg"
set mime.extension.png="image/png"
set mime.extension.gif="image/gif"
set mime.extension.bmp="image/bmp"

set mime.type.image.jpg = "image_viewer"
set mime.type.image.jpeg = "image_viewer"
set mime.type.image.png = "image_viewer"
set mime.type.image.gif = "image_viewer"
set mime.type.image.bmp = "image_viewer"
```

the image_pager.sh script is a one liner using chafa[] and lessi (less 
with sixel support)

```
URL=$1
chafa -C on --clear "${URL}" | lessi
```

pushing stuff to elinks rather than trying to handle directly in newsboat has 
the added feature that elinks is one of the few text browsers that supports 
javascript and cookie. so you've got a good chance the page will render
correctly.

bookmarking urls for reading later
----------------------------------

i've also enabled bookmarking (ctrl-b) in newsboat so that i can push those urls into
offpunk.

```
# $HOME/.newsboat/config
bookmark-cmd "$HOME/.newsboat/scripts/bookmark.sh"
bookmark-autopilot yes
```

the bookmark script is the one provided in examples[7] enabling autopilot means
the url is just passed to the script with no further questions asked.

since the example script stores one bookmark per line you can feed this into
offpunk using xargs to be synced at a later time.

```
cat bookmarks.txt | xargs -I{} offpunk --fetch-later {}
```

my sync (offline mode) commands are:

```
offpunk --sync bookmarks tour toread to_fetch --assume-yes --cache-validity 51840
newsboat -x reload print-unread
```

i've found it's better to explicitly sync the list in offpunk, there's some
news aggregator pages that seem to trigger longer fetch times. so i'd rather
pick articles from manually rather than have the latest links fetched.

tags: offpunk, rss, newsboat, elinks

[1] gemini://offpunk.net/
[2] https://newsboat.org/
[3] gemini://offpunk.net/subscriptions.gmi
[4] http://elinks.cz/documentation/html/manual.html-chunked/ch09s02.html
[5] https://github.com/hpjansson/chafa
[6] https://github.com/roblillack/lessi
[7] https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/blob/master/doc/examples/example-bookmark-plugin.sh

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