QuiteRSS Feed Reader Review

QuiteRSS made a very good impression on me because of the handy features it comes with and the pleasing look. It’s written with the aid of the Qt toolkit and gives the user the ability to organize the feeds in a tree-like structure, use tags, change the feed fetching interval and a lot of more features which I’m going to talk about in this article.

The latest version is 0.14.3, which was released on January 14, 2014. This release fixes several bugs, like resetting the zoom on tab switch, exporting feeds crash and importing feeds failure.

Features
It has support for tabs and several few browsing options which really make it stand out when compared to the default KDE reader, Akregator.

QuiteRSS has tab support, as well as basic web browsing functions, like back and forward buttons, the ability to change the font size. The web browser can be configured in Options.

quiterss_tabs

You can organize feeds in folders in a tree-style mode, and use tags and labels for every feed in particular, as well as customize per-feed updating time.

Other features include importing or exporting feeds as OPML files, organizing and sorting feeds by various criteria, system tray integration with the ability to show the number of unread feeds in the system tray icon.

Interface
By default, the window is split into four main areas, the feed tree-view, the categories widget, the list of news and the browser for visualizing the feeds content. You can change the browser position (default Bottom) and implicitely the news list. Here is a different look, with the browser to the left, side by side with the news list (helpful on widescreens):

viewmode

This can be accomplished via the View-Browser Position menu entry. Here you can also change the default green theme by choosing from several other themes, including the System style.

Configuration
QuiteRSS offers quite a plethora of configuration options via the Tools-Options??? menu entry.

options_general

options_tray

options_feeds

Conclusion
My verdict is that it’s better than Akregator, both feature-wise and when comparing browsing navigation. It’s also fast and it looks good, so it is worth a try. QuiteRSS gives a feeling of completion, looking as it was carefully built up to provide all you could ask, and also having enough options to be one of the best feed readers out there.

Installation in Ubuntu
QuiteRSS is not included in the repositories, but the PPA offers packages for all the latest versions. To add this PPA to your sources list and to install QuiteRSS, use the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:quiterss/quiterss
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install quiterss

If you want to remove it, type sudo apt-get remove ???purge quiterss.

QuiteRSS Homepage
QuiteRSS at Google Code