RSS Part 16: QuiteRSS Day 1

I started using QuiteRSS as my primary RSS client. After writing the client reflections blog entry, I reorganized the feed hierarchy to remove the feed folders that I used in Thunderbird to work around poor design, making some improvements to the categorization as well. I have now used QuiteRSS for my actual feed processing for one day.

The Qt user interface glitches seem to mostly happen in menus. While I had to use many menus to configure and organize the client, I do not use menus often when processing feeds. I think that I will be able to use QuiteRSS as my primary RSS client even with the glitches, and I hope that there are no glitches when I get my next computer.

The change that I have enjoyed most is the better hierarchy implementation. I process some feeds individually, but it is really nice to be able to select a folder in the hierarchy and process those feeds together! I have not been able to do this since switching to Thunderbird, and I did not realize how much I miss it.

The biggest problem that I failed to notice when I tried out QuiteRSS last week is that QuiteRSS does not copy URLs to the “primary selection” in Linux, like RSS Guard. I checked the issues but do not see any reference to this problem, so perhaps there are not many Linux users of this program. I will likely create an issue myself, but I have not done so yet because I prefer providing a solution when I submit issues (when possible).

It should be easy to fix the issue for item URLs. (source) Instead of copying the URL to just system clipboard, it should copy to the primary selection as well. I am not sure if this requires use of the pre-processor to ensure that this is done only on Linux or not, but I am thinking about code like the following:

QClipboard *clipboard = QApplication::clipboard();
clipboard->setText(copyStr, QClipboard::Clipboard);
clipboard->setText(copyStr, QClipboard::Selection);

Fixing the issue for podcast enclosure URLs looks like it might be more difficult, unfortunately. The problem is that the link is displayed in the embedded WebKit browser! I need to look into it further when I get time, which I definitely do not have now.

As a workaround, I am using the xsel utility to access the system clipboard from the command line. To download a URL, for example, a command like the following can be used:

$ wget $(xsel -ob)

I need to paste URLs into documents in Vim as well, so I had to look up the command to paste from the system clipboard, which I generally never have to do:

"+p

I just need to get used to doing this for now, and I hope that I can patch QuiteRSS to copy to the primary selection in the future.

I saw one other strange issue while using QuiteRSS. After checking all feeds, one feed included a number of items that were already marked as read. They were new items, and other new items were unread. This is strange.