John Kitchin has been vlogging up a storm. He’s producing so many videos, Irreal is having a hard time keeping up. One of his recent offerings is a really great1 video on one of my favorite Emacs packages: Elfeed. Elfeed, of course, is the Emacs RSS reader. My use of it is pretty much out-of-the-box: it had everything I needed and in any event there weren’t any obvious ways of customizing it short of digging into the code. Kitchin, of course, showed that for the nonsense it is. He’s made numerous tweaks without touching the Elfeed source code.
The first thing that struck me was that he set up a timer to update his feed database automatically, much like email. Elfeed doesn’t have that built in but it’s a trivial one command addition to the Elfeed config to implement it.
He also sets some font faces so that article headlines display in a different color depending on their subject matter. The latest Elfeed README has some guidance on how to do this. If this appeals to you, it’s easy to do and Kitchin explains one implementation.
For most people, Kitchin’s biggest tweak is probably his implementation of scoring. He used to have a home-grown solution for that but now uses the elfeed-score package. It provides Gnus style scoring so that articles that are of the most interest to you are at the top. If you have lots of feeds, seldomly check them, or have limited time to deal with them, scoring is an excellent way of concentrating on the ones most important to you.
Being a researcher, Kitchin also has several functions to do things like email an RSS entry to a colleague, capture an entry into his bibliography database and store links for later use.
If you aren’t an Elfeed user, you should be. If you are an Elfeed user, you should definitely watch Kitchin’s video; it has a ton of useful ideas to make your workflow better and easier.
Footnotes:
The video mentions Irreal, which is gratifying but not why I think it’s great. For more on that, read on.