cosmic-rss

⚠️ DISCLAIMER: This project is a learning exercise and is under development. It is not production-ready and may have bugs, missing features, or break between updates.

A simple RSS reader built with libcosmic and Rust, designed for the COSMIC desktop environment on Linux.

What it does

• Fetches articles from a hardcoded list of RSS feeds (news, tech, science, open source)
• Stores them locally in a SQLite database so they persist between launches
• Displays feeds in a collapsible sidebar — click a feed to filter articles
• Lazy-loads articles as you scroll, 50 at a time
• Auto-syncs every 10 minutes in the background
• "Refresh" button in the header to trigger an immediate sync

What it doesn't do (yet)

• Feeds are hardcoded — no way to add or remove feeds from the UI (you have to edit sync.rs directly)
• No article reading view — titles only, no content or summary pane
• No read/unread tracking
• No search
• No notifications
• RSS has no historical pagination, so older articles only accumulate over time as you leave the app running

Requirements

• Fedora Linux (tested on Fedora 40+)
• Rust stable toolchain via rustup

Building

1. Install system dependencies

sudo dnf install -y \
    cargo \
    cmake \
    just \
    expat-devel \
    fontconfig-devel \
    freetype-devel \
    libxkbcommon-devel \
    mesa-libGL-devel \
    mesa-libEGL-devel \
    wayland-devel \
    pkgconf-pkg-config \
    gcc \
    g++

2. Install Rust (if not already installed)

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source "$HOME/.cargo/env"

3. Clone and build

git clone <your-repo-url>
cd CosmicRSS

# Check for errors without building
cargo check

# Debug build (unoptimised, good for development)
cargo run

# Release build (optimised, recommended for actual use)
cargo build --release
./target/release/cosmic-rss

On first run, rss.db will be created in the current directory. Delete it to start fresh:

rm rss.db && ./target/release/cosmic-rss

Or do everything at once with this command:

cargo build --release && rm rss.db && ./target/release/cosmic-rss

Project structure

src/
├── main.rs    # App struct, UI layout, nav sidebar, message handling
├── feed.rs    # Entry and Channel data types
├── sync.rs    # RSS fetching, background sync loop
└── db.rs      # SQLite setup, read/write helpers

Adding feeds

Open src/sync.rs and add URLs to the URLS array at the top of the file:

const URLS: &[&str] = &[
    "https://example.com/feed.rss",
    // ...
];

Then rebuild. The new feeds will be fetched on the next sync.

Dependencies

Contributing

This is primarily a personal learning project for exploring libcosmic and Rust GUI development. Issues and PRs are welcome but response time may be slow.