OldNews

Yesterday evening I released v1.3.0 of OldNews, my terminal-based client for TheOldReader.

The main reason for this release is that html_to_markdown had a major release and the one function I use from it fundamentally changed the return type, causing OldNews to crash any time you tried to read an article.

It was a quick enough fix, although it's one I want to go back and review and perhaps see if there's a better approach, or see if this new return type offers something I could be making better use of.

The one other change, which I made a wee while ago but hadn't got round to releasing yet (I've been kind of distracted recently), is that OldNews now only makes a call out to the API to mark an article as read when you read it, but only if it was previously unread. A small internal change nobody should really notice, but it saves on work.

If you're a user of TheOldReader and fancy interacting with it from the terminal too then it's out there to try out. It's licensed GPL-3.0 and available via GitHub and also via PyPI. If you have an environment that has pipx installed you should be able to get up and running with:

pipx install oldnews

It can also be installed using uv:

uv tool install oldnews

If you don't have uv installed you can use uvx.sh to perform the installation. For GNU/Linux or macOS or similar:

curl -LsSf uvx.sh/oldnews/install.sh | sh

or on Windows:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://uvx.sh/oldnews/install.ps1 | iex"

Once installed, run the oldnews command.