RSS Guard Is A Qt Desktop RSS Feed Reader With Support For Syncing With Feedly, Google Reader API, More
RSS Guard is a free and open source Qt RSS feed reader for Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS. The application can synchronize with services like Tiny Tiny RSS, Inoreader, Nextcloud News, and with the latest 3.9.0 version released today, Feedly and services supporting the Google Reader API (The Old Reader, Bazqux, Reedah, FreshRSS, etc.).
The application supports RSS / RDF / ATOM / JSON feed formats, as well as podcasts using RSS / ATOM / JSON. Besides syncing with the online services mentioned above via plugins, RSS Guard can also add feeds locally, with support for importing and exporting feeds to/from OPML 2.0.
The user interface is highly customizable, allowing users to hide various elements, add or remove buttons to/from the toolbar, and even use a vertical or horizontal layout (with the latter being great for ultrawide screens). A full screen mode is also included.
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| RSS Guard horizontal layout |
That's not all. RSS Guard is feature-packed, also including things like:
- support for scraping websites which do not offer RSS/ATOM feeds and other related advanced features
- feed categorization
- able to show unread feeds/messages only
- can be controlled via keyboard
- fully skinable user interface + ability to create your own skins (by default it includes a light and dark skin)
- newspaper view
- tabbed interface
- ability to hide list of feeds/categories
- tray icon
- scriptable message filtering
- downloader with own tab and support for up to 6 parallel downloads
- enhanced feed auto-updating with separate time intervals
- "portable" mode support with clever auto-detection
- application-wide and account-specific network proxies support
- fully-featured recycle bin
- feed metadata fetching including icons
- much more
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It's also worth noting that RSS Guard includes a Gmail plugin which allows users to send and receive email messages.
The application comes in two variants. A web-based variant with WebEngine-based bundled message viewer that loads the articles using their original formatting and layout (this uses more RAM), and a lite package that uses a simple text-based message viewer. The web-based variant includes an ad blocker which supports lists in the AdBlock-Plus format, as well as element hiding rules and site-wide blocking.
As far as the Linux packages go, the RSS Guard developer provides AppImage binaries for both of these variants (with the package having "nowebengine" in its name offering the lite version with simple text-based message viewer), while the Flatpak package uses the simple text-based message viewer.
The screenshot at the top of the article uses the WebEngine-based article viewer (using an AppImage binary). This is a screenshot of the simple text-based message viewer in action (using the package from FlatHub):
Besides Feedly and Google Reader API support, which I already mentioned at the top of the article, the latest RSS Guard 3.9.0 adds Liferea-like Website scraping and feed post-processing, an option to load articles in an external web browser, and per-account proxy support. Also, with this release, RSS Guard has been ported to OS/2 (ArcaOS, eComStation). You can find the complete changelog on the application GitHub releases page.
Download RSS Guard
The RSS Guard GitHub releases page offers binaries for Linux (AppImage for both the WebEngine version and the lite version), macOS and Windows (both WebEngine and lite). The application can also be installed on Linux from Flathub (this is the lite, no WebEngine version).
To use the AppImage on Linux, right-click the file, choose "Properties" and make it executable from there, then double-click the file to run it.
