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https://github.com/eafer/rdrview

Firefox Reader View as a command line tool
https://github.com/eafer/rdrview

cli elinks firefox freebsd html links linux lynx macos newsbeuter newsboat openbsd rss terminal w3m

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Firefox Reader View as a command line tool

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README 

        
# rdrview



Command line tool to extract the main content from a webpage, as done by the

"Reader View" feature of most modern browsers. It's intended to be used with

terminal RSS readers, to make the articles more readable on web browsers such

as lynx. The code is closely adapted from

[the Firefox version](https://github.com/mozilla/readability)

and the output is expected to be mostly equivalent.



## Security



This tool is young and written in C, so it's reasonable to wonder about the

potential for memory issues. To be safe, all HTML parsing happens inside a

sandboxed subprocess. Seccomp is used for this purpose on Linux, Pledge on

OpenBSD, and Capsicum on FreeBSD.



## Usage



### Linux



There are three direct dependencies: libxml2, libseccomp and libcurl.

On Debian/Ubuntu, you can install the first two by running (as root):



    apt install libxml2-dev libseccomp-dev



The libcurl package comes in different flavours, depending on the backend that

provides the SSL support. Any of them will do. To install the GnuTLS version:



    apt install libcurl4-gnutls-dev



For _rdrview_ to be useful, you should also get a character mode web browser

such as lynx:



    apt install lynx



The name of the packages might differ in your distribution. On Fedora, for

example, you can install everything with:



    dnf install libcurl-devel libxml2-devel libseccomp-devel lynx



To build _rdrview_, just cd to its directory and run



    make



Now it should be ready to be used. You can try:



    ./rdrview 'https://github.com/eafer/rdrview'



For more information, see the man page:



    man ./rdrview.1



If you find _rdrview_ useful and want to install it, become root again and run



    make install



Now you can just call it with `rdrview` and get help with `man rdrview`, like

you would for any other tool in your system.



### BSDs



To build _rdrview_ on the BSDs, you will need GNU make as well as the libraries.

Having a terminal browser available is recommended. On OpenBSD, become root and

run



    pkg_add gmake gcc libxml curl lynx



On FreeBSD, that would be



    pkg install gmake gcc libxml2 curl lynx



Now you can cd to the source directory and run `gmake` for the build, and

optionally `gmake install` for the installation. The BSDs don't provide any

mailcap file by default, so to run rdrview you will need to specify the web

browser:



    ./rdrview -B lynx 'https://github.com/eafer/rdrview'



### macOS



I don't own any Apple computers to test this myself, but I've been told that

_rdrview_ does build on macOS. A sandbox is not yet implemented, but the tool

can still be run with the `--disable-sandbox` flag, as long as the user

understands the risk.



## Credits



_rdrview_ was written by

[Ernesto A. Fernández](mailto:[email protected]),

but it's mainly a transpilation done by hand of Mozilla's _Readability.js_;

which was itself, in their own words, "heavily based on Arc90's

readability.js". This is the original license:



    Copyright (c) 2010 Arc90 Inc



    Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");

    you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.

    You may obtain a copy of the License at



       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0



    Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software

    distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,

    WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

    See the License for the specific language governing permissions and

    limitations under the License.