Recently, I embarked on what could best be described as a scouting combine for Mac-based newsreaders. I downloaded and played around with all of the major Mac-based newsreader apps, and probably most of the niche or lesser-known ones as well in an effort to find the one that was best for me.
The result? NetNewsWire now has a permanent position on my Dock. While that might not be a huge surprise given it has been around for a couple years now and is the market share leader for Mac newsreader clients, I have been really happy with it so far and am hopeful this ends my cycle of searching for the perfect newsreader. (I will save why I went Mac-based instead of web-based and more in-depth thoughts about the newsreader landscape for another post.)
With NetNewsWire, I am getting through my RSS feeds in record time, and one reason is its excellent support for keyboard shortcuts. To quote Brent Simmons, the application’s author, “NetNewsWire was designed to be read with a cup of coffee in one hand while the other drives the keyboard.”
I couldn’t agree more. I recognize that other newsreader apps have great keyboard support as well, but I have been impressed with how intuitive the NetNewsWire implementation has been. I believe that if you only use these ten keyboard shortcuts, you will be blazing through your news feeds in record time:
- Space – If you only know one shortcut, this is it. Hitting space will either go to the next unread article or scroll an article ahead if scrolling is required. Theoretically you could only use this shortcut and you could read every article in the newsreader.
- Arrow keys
* Up / Down – These do exactly what you’d expect. They navigate up and down by item in the respective pane.
- r – Marks item as read.
- u – Marks item as unread.
- k – Marks all items as read. Why is this a great shortcut? If you have a feed that has pumped out a dozen or so articles since you last checked it, all you have to do is visually scan the headlines, and then once you’ve gone through any articles you wanted to read, hit k to quickly mark all of the others as read.
- Command W – Closes a tab. This is a standard Mac shortcut, but the reason I put it on this list is because it comes in really useful when you use NetNewsWire’s integrated web browser to read articles. If you go into the full web view of an article, you just hit this shortcut and you will get right back to the news interface.
- Return – View full version of an article. It has the same functionality as the right arrow described above, but is more intuitive. I find that I use both.
- Option – Command – S – Add to clippings. I use Clippings as a temporary holding area for articles that I want to read later and/or add to Delicious when I have more time.
- Shift – Command – R – Refresh all. The fastest refresh time you can configure for NetNewsWire is to check for new articles every 30 minutes. Therefore if you want to do a quick check to make sure you’ve got all the latest content, just hit this combo.
- Control – Command – ‘ - Post to Delicious. While not for everyone, if you use Delicious this is a great shortcut. On a side note, NetNewsWire also supports direct posting to blogs and Twitterific in case you were wondering.
- Shift – Command – R – Refresh all. The fastest refresh time you can configure for NetNewsWire is to check for new articles every 30 minutes. Therefore if you want to do a quick check to make sure you’ve got all the latest content, just hit this combo.
- Control – Command – ‘ - Post to Delicious. While not for everyone, if you use Delicious this is a great shortcut. On a side note, NetNewsWire also supports direct posting to blogs and Twitterific in case you were wondering.
If these have you interested in learning more, you can get a more complete list of NetNewsWires’s keyboard shortcuts by going to Help>Keyboard Shortcuts in the application itself.
