After reading the sad news that Chris Wellons is abandoning Emacs and the Emacs packages he developed one of my first concerns was for Elfeed. It’s the RSS reader that I depend on everyday for my research and news curation. Wellons will be missed for many reasons but his stewardship of Elfeed is the most important one to me.
I’m all but certain that Wellons will find good hands in which to entrust the future of Elfeed but as I learned in the Boy Scouts, it pays to be prepared. Serendipitously, I stumbled upon this post from Dave’s Blog that mentions he moved from Elfeed to Gnus. The post is about a solution he found for following links referred to in the RSS summary but I was more interested in his use of Gnus in place of Elfeed for RSS.
I’ve considered, off and on, moving to Gnus but I’m really happy with mu4e for email and elfeed for RSS and Network News is, sadly, no longer important so moving to Gnus didn’t make much sense to me. Now, unfortunately, I may have to think about it. Gnus is a powerful complicated program and it seems a shame to use it just for RSS but if worse comes to worst it’s nice to have a mature and reliable fallback available.
As I said, I’m pretty sure Elfeed won’t have any problems finding a new maintainer who will sustain its high quality but it’s nice to know that if I need it, there’s a viable, Emacs-based solution available.