Reading

Moving around

Move between articles, open them, and search.

Move with j and k, or the arrow keys. ⏎ opens full view and closes it again; → also opens the article, and ← jumps back to the sidebar. d and u scroll the reading pane.

o opens the original in your browser. / searches your articles. ⌘K reaches everything else.

Unread articles carry a dot, and an article counts as read once it is opened in full view or scrolled.

Sorting. The sort control sits above the list: newest first, oldest first, shortest read, longest read, or title A–Z. The default is set under Settings → Reading.

Reading time is estimated from a words-per-minute figure you can change under Settings → Reading. It can be hidden.

How it looks. Text size, font (sans, serif or mono) and line width are under Settings → Reading. Themes follow the system by default; light and dark are in the action bar and under Settings → Appearance.

Remote images can be turned off, which keeps newsletters from knowing you opened them. When an article has a featured image that doesn’t already appear in the text, Feeds shows it above the article — and leaves it out of printing, PDF and EPUB.

Inbox, Saved, Archive

Every article is in one of three places.

You see one at a time.

• Inbox — new, unread. Press g i or ⌘1.
• Saved — kept for later. Press s to save, g s or ⌘2 to go there.
• Archive — done with. Press e to archive, g a or ⌘3 to go there.

Archiving is a toggle, so e puts it back. ⌘Z undoes the last archive, save, or tag.

Notes sits with those three in the sidebar, but it is not a fourth place an article can be: it is everything you have written a note on. An article with a note stays in its Inbox, or its Archive, and shows up in Notes as well. Notes of your own — the ones with no article attached — live there too. See Notes.

Unread articles carry a dot. An article counts as read once it is opened in full view or scrolled — not passed over on the way down the list. Whether opening an article marks it read is a setting, under Reading.

Articles you save from the web by address arrive on the Saved shelf too.

Subscriber-only posts go straight to the Archive, marked paid. Some newsletters send every post to everyone, and the ones you haven’t paid for arrive as a headline, a sentence or two, and a subscribe button. They stay in their feed and in search. Turn it off under Settings → Reading.

To clear a whole view at once, use Archive everything here in the action bar, or Article → Archive Everything Here. It names how many it will archive before acting, works on the entire view rather than the rows on screen, and ⌘Z restores it.

Saving articles from the web

Save any web article by its address.

Choose Save article… in the action bar and paste the address of any article on the web, whether you subscribe to the site or not.

Feeds fetches the page, extracts the readable text, and files it under the publication it came from where that can be worked out. Saved articles land on the Saved shelf, alongside everything else you have saved from your feeds. They can be tagged, searched, exported and printed like any other article.

The Feeds button for your browser does the same thing in one click.

Sites that won’t hand over the page

Some publications serve their pages to a browser and to nothing else. Feeds cannot fetch the text from those.

The link is saved instead. The article appears on the shelf like anything else, it turns up in search, and it carries a link only mark in the list; opening it names the site that refused and offers to open the page in your browser.

A page that has been taken down is different: Feeds says so rather than saving a link to nothing.

Articles saved this way exist nowhere else, so they are never removed by the storage settings and the source they sit under cannot be deleted like an ordinary feed.

Searching

Full-text search across everything Feeds has stored.

Press / to search. It searches every article Feeds holds — titles, excerpts, and the full text where Feeds has it.

Typing half a word finds the whole one, so results narrow as you type.

Operators

What you type	What it does
bicycle repair	Both words. Several words are required together.
"bicycle repair"	That exact phrase.
bicycle OR motorbike	Either one.
bicycle NOT electric	The first without the second.
bicycle -electric	The same thing, shorter.
bicy*	Anything starting with those letters.

AND, OR and NOT are recognized in capitals. To search for one of those words literally, put it in quotes.

Anything else you type — punctuation, stray quotes, an apostrophe — is treated as part of what you’re looking for rather than as an instruction, so a search never fails with a syntax error.

Offline reading

Cached articles stay readable without a connection.

Feeds caches the full text of articles as it fetches them.

Press r to refresh everything. Feeds also refreshes in the background — every 15 minutes by default, adjustable under Settings → Feeds, or off entirely.

Everything is stored on your Mac. There is no account and no server, so nothing to sign in to and nothing to sync.

How long the archive is kept, and the ceiling it’s capped at, are under Settings → Storage. Saved articles, tagged articles and anything still in the inbox are never expired.

The window

Three columns, and how to hide and resize them.

Feeds is three columns: the sidebar, the article list, and the reading pane.

Hiding a column. ⌥⌘S hides the sidebar; ⌥⌘L hides the article list. Both are under View, in the action bar, and have buttons at the top-left of the window. A hidden column stays hidden until you bring it back. Hide both and the reading pane has the window to itself.

Resizing. Drag either divider. Double-click a divider to restore its default width. When a divider has focus, the arrow keys move it. Widths are remembered.

Themes follow the system by default. Light and dark are in the action bar and under Settings → Appearance.

With the system’s Reduce Motion setting on, animations and smooth scrolling stop.

Notes

Your own words, kept beside what you read.

Notes sits at the end of the sidebar, after Inbox, Saved and Archive. Two kinds of thing live there.

A note on an article

Open any article and there is an Add note line above it. Click it, or press n, and write.

The article then appears in Notes. It stays wherever else it already was — writing a note does not clear it out of your Inbox, and does not archive it.

The note sits above the article.

To take it off, clear the text, or use Remove note. The article stays exactly where it was; only the note goes.

If you email an article you have written a note on, the note goes into the body of the message, above the link.

A note of your own

Press ⌘⇧N for a note with no article attached.

Its first line becomes its title. Change the first line and the title changes with it.

A note of your own appears in Notes only. In every other way it is an ordinary item: search finds it, tags work on it, and it exports to EPUB and prints like anything else.

Nothing to save

Notes are saved as you type, and again when you click away. There is no Save button. The editor says Saved for a moment after each write.

Press esc to finish: it saves and puts you back in the article list, where j and k work again.

What can and can’t be lost

Notes are never removed by the storage settings, whichever kind they are. The rest of the Archive is cleaned up over time.

A note standing on its own is the one thing in Feeds you can delete outright — Delete note, which asks first, because there is no undo for it. A note on an article can’t be deleted, only removed; the article itself is untouched.

Keys

Key	Action
⌘⇧N	New note
n	Write a note on the open article
g n ⌘4	Go to Notes

All three are in the action bar (⌘K) as well, and Notes is in the View menu.