Then I moved to newsbeuter. It has extensive configuration options, integration with bloglines, google reader (I don’t use it bug I have tried it and it works perfectly, only too slow to update all feeds (as I mentioned I have lots of them)). It can invoke external applications on links, it supports podcasts (audio and video feeds), it has query language, it supports external commands for grabbing the feeds (so you can use wget to get your feed with particular cookies file/proxy settings for protected feeds for example), it has ‘killfile’ options, it supports macros, it has filters… All in all it is a very powerful application, combining ideas from email clients, scripting languages, news readers and web into console interface application.

How I use it:

First of all – I set the browser to bash script instead of an actual browser, the script then tries to figure out what the link holds and act accordingly: feh for images, elinks for html, clive for flash video links, mplayer for video/audio links, swfdec for regular flash. There are time when posts are simply better and faster viewed with graphical browser – then I use the macro language:
macro o set browser “surf %u 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null &” ; open-in-browser ; set browser “browse.sh %u”
Surf is the simplest and smallest webkit based browser I know of.

I also use the query language to define group of news (grouping is essential to me because of the large number of feeds I follow).

It keeps the feed entries in sqlite db, vacuuming it from time to time helps speed things up.

The only thing I don’t like about it is the default colorscheme. The first thing I do after installing it is to change the borders/frame to the same black used in the panels. Next I start adding marks for my favorite directories and “ex” commands for my favorite utilities.

If there’s something mc can do that vifm cannot, I haven’t found it. So it’s probably not anything I need.

##################
# default config #
##################
$config = {
# open new screen window for browser?
‘use_screen’ => true,

# screen command
‘screen_cmd’ => ['screen', '-t', '%s'],

# browser options
‘browser’ => ‘/usr/bin/links’,
‘browser_cmd’ => ['${browser}', '-g', '%s'],
}

I use screen anyway, and have .screenrc set up to invoke Raggle. I guess the important section for your purposes is the last one. It’s probably clear what’s going on, but if not, I set the ‘browser’ variable to the path to my browser of choice, and added the necessary flags – in my case ‘-g’ to get the graphics mode in links – in separate single quotes, before the ‘%s’ which calls the URL in question. Don’t forget the commas.

And yet, no one has said anything about bb?
You can get it from Ubuntu’s package manager. Then go to any tty and type ‘bb’. Don’t forget the music