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nak0x 3f71d324c9 Add search, feeds and listing views to the reader server Extraction looks for prose, so a front page, a comment thread or a search result page correctly yields almost nothing. These render the structure instead, and every link they emit routes back through /read. /search?q= results from a configurable HTML endpoint /feed?u= RSS and Atom /read?u= now picks a site view, falling back to a link index when a page has too little text to be an article Feeds are scanned rather than parsed. A feed needs five fields per entry and an HTML parser mangles XML, so this walks the tags directly: CDATA, named and numeric entities, and Atom's preference for rel=alternate over rel=self. No XML dependency. Hacker News gets a real adapter: stories with score, author and a link into the discussion, and comment threads rendered with their indent preserved. Comment bodies go through the article renderer so links inside them behave like every other link. Search is deliberately engine-agnostic. Known result shapes are tried first, then heading links, then any link, because every free HTML endpoint eventually rate-limits a repeat visitor. When one answers with a challenge page rather than results the reader says so and points at the config, instead of showing an empty page; detection reads the body, since these arrive as 200 or 202 rather than an error status. A blocked search is never cached. Pages that turn out to be feeds redirect to the feed view, and a page that declares its own feed offers it.		2026-09-06 20:07:49 +02:00
furst-read	Add search, feeds and listing views to the reader server	2026-09-06 20:07:49 +02:00
furst-serve	Add search, feeds and listing views to the reader server	2026-09-06 20:07:49 +02:00
src	Add furst, a URL router for low-end hardware	2026-09-06 19:18:13 +02:00
.gitignore	Add furst, a URL router for low-end hardware	2026-09-06 19:18:13 +02:00
Cargo.lock	Add furst-serve, a local reader server	2026-09-06 19:55:59 +02:00
Cargo.toml	Add furst-serve, a local reader server	2026-09-06 19:55:59 +02:00
LICENSE	Add furst, a URL router for low-end hardware	2026-09-06 19:18:13 +02:00
README.md	Add furst-read, an article extractor and minimal renderer	2026-09-06 19:35:30 +02:00

README.md

furst

A URL router. It sits where your default browser used to, and sends each URL to the cheapest tool that can actually handle it — mpv for video, a pager for PDFs, a light WebKit browser for reading, and Firefox only when nothing else will do.

Built for a Core2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, where the browser is the problem.

Why

A news page is 2–5MB across 80+ requests with 1–3MB of JavaScript to parse and JIT. The same article extracted is ~20KB. Choosing a lighter engine buys 2–3×; not loading the payload at all buys 10–100×. furst is the dispatcher that decides which of those you get, per URL.

Install

cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/furst ~/.local/bin/furst

furst --init      # writes ~/.config/furst/rules.toml, probes for a light browser
furst --install   # registers furst as the system default browser

--install writes ~/.local/share/applications/furst.desktop and points xdg-settings at it, so every link click in every application routes here.

Use

furst <url>              # match a rule and exec its command
furst --explain <url>    # show what would run, and why; run nothing
furst --list             # show the loaded rules

--explain is the one you want when a URL goes somewhere surprising:

$ furst --explain https://youtu.be/abc123
scheme  https
host    youtu.be
path    /abc123

-> [video] mpv --ytdl-format=bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height<=?720]+... https://youtu.be/abc123
   [default] surf https://youtu.be/abc123

Rules

~/.config/furst/rules.toml. First matching rule wins. If its command is missing from $PATH, furst falls through to the next matching rule, and finally to default — which is what lets you name tools you have not written yet and have the config stay working today.

default = ["surf", "{url}"]

[[rule]]
name = "video"
hosts = ["youtube.com", "youtu.be"]
run = ["mpv", "--ytdl-format=bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height<=?720]+bestaudio/best", "{url}"]

[[rule]]
name = "hn"
hosts = ["news.ycombinator.com"]
terminal = true                      # wrap in $TERMINAL -e
run = ["furst-hn", "{url}"]

A rule matches when every criterion it states is satisfied; a criterion is satisfied by any one of its patterns. A rule that states nothing matches everything.

Key	Matches against
`schemes`	`https`, `mailto`, `magnet`, …
`hosts`	`example.com` = apex and every subdomain; `.example.com` = same; `=example.com` = that host exactly; `` = any
`paths`	path component only, glob with `*`, case-insensitive
`contains`	substring of the whole raw URL

Placeholder
`{url}` `{url_enc}`	the URL, raw or percent-encoded
`{host}` `{path}` `{scheme}`	parsed components

If no argument mentions {url} or {url_enc}, the URL is appended last.

Notes for old hardware

Force H.264 for video. A Core2 handles 720p avc1 in software but stalls on VP9/AV1, which is what YouTube serves by default. That format string is doing more work than the resolution cap.
Host matching strips userinfo with rfind('@'), so https://bank.example@evil.example/ routes on evil.example.
furst execs the handler rather than forking, so it leaves no process behind.

Companion tools

furst-read — fetch a page, extract the article, and render it as minimal HTML with no scripts, stylesheets, or webfonts. The reader rule in the starter config points at it.

License

MIT

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