Usage

You can use the C-x w shortcut to start Elfeed. If you press ‘G’, it will fetch the latest news feeds from the servers, starting with the message ‘3 feeds pending, 0 in process …’. A screenshot of Elfeed in GNU Emacs is shown in Figure 1.

The RSS entries are stored in the ~/.elfeed directory on your system.

You can read a blog entry by pressing the ‘Enter’ key. If you would like to open an entry in a browser, you can use the ‘b’ key. In order to copy the selected URL entry, you can use the ‘y’ key. To mark an entry as read, you can use the ‘r’ key, and to unmark an entry, press the ‘u’ key. You can add and remove tags for an entry using the ‘+’ and ‘-’ keys, respectively.

You can also filter the feeds based on search critera. Pressing ‘s’ will allow you to update the filter that you want to use. There are many filter options available. You can use ‘+’ to indicate that a tag must be present and ‘-’ to indicate that the tag must be absent — for example, ‘+projects –people’.

The filter text starting with ‘@’ represents a relative time. It can contain plain English text combined with dashes -- for example, ‘@1-month-ago +unread’. The ‘!’ notation can be used to negate a filter. To limit the number of entries to be displayed, you can use the ‘#’ symbol. For example, ‘+unread #5’ will list five unread blog articles. A screenshot of Elfeed with a filter applied is shown in Figure 2.

You can also use regular expressions as part of your filter text. The default search filter can be changed by modifying the value of elfeedsearchfilter. For example:

The search format date can be customised as shown below:

Elfeed also has an export option to view the feeds in a browser. If you install the elfeed-web package from the packages list, you can then start it using M-x elfeed-web-start. You can then start a browser, and open http://localhost:8080/elfeed/ to