NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire is an open source feed reader for Mac. It does everything one would expect from a feed reader without bogging the user down with excess frippery, and does so with elegance.

Install

Install Homebrew if you don’t already have it, then open a terminal and give the command brew install netnewswire

First time setup

You will find NetNewsWire in Launchpad; launch it. It comes pre-populated with general interest feeds, which is probably a good idea so that RSS newbies quickly grasp what a feed reader is, but you know what you’re doing and what you want, so delete them. Select them all, right click, and choose Delete. Bye, Felicia.

I find NetNewsWire’s default settings to be sensible, but if you’d like to see what you can do, they are in the usual place: in the menu bar, NetNewsWire – Settings. If you go there one thing you will see is that NetNewsWire can sync with online feed services such as Feedbin. If you use one of them, go ahead and set that up here, then close the settings window.

Otherwise, directly subscribe to the feeds you want. In NetNewsWire’s main window, press the big + sign and select “New Web Feed”. Paste your desired feed’s URL here, or even just the URL of the site and let NetNewsWire find the feed for you.

Get enough feeds and you might need to organize them. Press the big + sign again but this time choose “New Folder”. Create folders as desired, then drag and drop feeds into them.

More information

One of my favorite things about NetNewsWire is that I find it so intuitive that I don’t see any need to explain how to use it. If you disagree, see its website for more information.