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Newsprint

The anti-ticker. Newsprint reads any set of RSS or Atom feeds — including subreddits — and sets them like a newspaper front page that quietly turns its own pages. No crawl, no red, no thumbnails, no urgency: a headline, a source, and an age, in a hierarchy you can read from across the room.

Newsprint paper theme: the day's headlines set in a broadsheet-style typographic layout on a warm off-white background.
PaperWarm off-white, for a room with daylight in it.
Newsprint dark theme: the day's headlines set in a broadsheet-style typographic layout, columns of subreddit and RSS stories.
DarkThe same layout for a room that is not.

Where the news comes from

Any RSS or Atom feed you name, plus subreddits by bare name. Nothing is curated for you and there is no default agenda — the sources are the ones you put in the URL.

Where it runs

Self-hosted, single container, no database. The feed cache lives in memory and rebuilds on the first request after a restart.

What it wants

A screen far enough away that you read headlines, not stories. It sets in columns and turns its own pages on a timer you choose.

Setup

Put Newsprint on a screen.

A browser is genuinely enough — Plash and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.

Any screen

nothing to install
  1. Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
  2. Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
  3. Or give it a browser of its own, which is what a dedicated panel wants: chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.
  4. Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

via Plash
  1. Install Plash from the Mac App Store — it renders any web page as your desktop wallpaper.
  2. Menu bar icon → Open URL… and paste the display’s address.
  3. Leave Browsing Mode off so clicks pass through to your desktop as normal.
  4. Plash reloads on wake, so it recovers on its own after sleep.
sindresorhus.com/plash →

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk
  1. On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
  2. Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
  3. Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
  4. Turn on Start on Boot so a power blip brings the display back by itself.
fully-kiosk.com →

Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.

Configuration

URL parameters.

Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at newsprint.livingkiosk.com/setup.

ParameterDefaultMeaning
rComma-separated subreddits.
feedsComma-separated RSS/Atom URLs.
themedarkdark or paper.
limit10Headlines per page (4–24). Reduced automatically if they don’t fit the screen.
cycle24Seconds between page turns (5–3600).
pagePin to a fixed page (1-based) and stop auto-advancing.
dim0Black scrim over everything, 0 to 0.8 (fleet-wide convention).

Newsprint is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command — the repositories go public at launch.