Dank News RSS & Ticker (v2)

RSS and Atom feeds for DankMaterialShell, three ways: a desktop card, a full-width scrolling ticker bar, and an optional in-bar pill.

Fork of BrendonJL/dms-rss-widget by @Xn4m3d. v1 was BrendonJL's desktop RSS widget — all credit for the original goes to him. v2 keeps the desktop card and adds a scrolling ticker bar (overlay) plus an optional bar pill companion, on top of a set of fixes and security hardening (the core fixes were also offered back upstream as PRs). Same MIT license.

What's in this repo

Two DMS plugins:

Folder	Plugin	What it is
dankNewsRssTicker/	Dank News RSS & Ticker (desktop)	The desktop card and the full-width scrolling ticker bar (overlay)
dankNewsRssTickerPill/	Dank News RSS & Ticker Pill (widget)	A small scrolling pill inside the DankBar, reading the same feeds

Only one ticker can be active at a time (the desktop overlay or the bar pill) — enabling one automatically disables the other.

Features

Desktop card

• RSS 2.0 and Atom with auto-detection, configurable refresh interval (5 min – 24 h)
• Add/edit/remove feeds, OPML import, quick-add presets (US/global news, tech, Reddit)
• Sort modes (newest / oldest / grouped by feed), compact & expanded views, thumbnails
• Read/unread tracking with mark-all, new-item toast notifications, per-source filter tags
• Optional Name label, appearance customization (font size, background opacity, borders)
• Settings organized in 3 tabs: General / Card / Ticker bar

Ticker bar — overlay (new in v2)

• Full-width scrolling headlines; reuses the card's in-memory items (no extra fetching)
• Adapts to the main bar's position (see below): docks under a top bar, follows a bottom bar (docks just above it), or — for a vertical (left/right) bar — sits at the top with its width reduced to the space beside the bar
• Docks to a screen edge (reserves space, foreground) or floats in between (behind windows), with a magnet snap to the edges while dragging
• Right-click-and-drag to move it; drag the right edge to resize the width (snaps back to full); scroll while holding right-click to tune the background opacity; press S to toggle 100%/50%
• Tunable width, horizontal position, vertical offset (when docked), height, corner radius, border, fonts, scroll speed, item spacing; option to show/hide while the compositor overview is open
• Latest-N items or per-source round-robin; click a headline to open it; pause on hover

Main bar position

The ticker stays consistent with where you put your DankBar:

Main bar	Ticker bar
Top	docks just under it (reserves space)
Bottom	follows it — docks just above it (reserves space)
Left / Right (vertical)	docks at the top or bottom of the screen, width reduced to the area beside the bar — and reserves just that strip (the vertical bar keeps its full height, no corner gap); the pill mode is disabled

Moving the bar — even live, from the DankBar settings — re-settles the ticker automatically: it follows to the new edge without overlapping or shoving the bar around.

Multi-bar setups: the ticker positions itself relative to the first bar config only; extra bars (a second bar on another edge or monitor) aren't accounted for yet. Open an issue if you need it.

Bar pill — companion (new in v2)

• The same scrolling headlines as a compact widget inside the DankBar (horizontal bars only — it's automatically disabled when the main bar is vertical)
• Mutually exclusive with the desktop overlay, with shortcut buttons to jump between the two settings pages

Hardening & fixes (also offered upstream)

• 🔒 Hardened curl (http/https only, bounded redirects & response size, ReDoS-capped parsing, isSafeUrl() allowlist for opened links & thumbnails)
• 🩹 No blank flash on resize/recreate · 🖱️ ignores stray Niri-overview clicks · 💾 item cache for instant redraw

Installation

Clone the repo and symlink each plugin you want into your DMS plugins directory:

git clone https://github.com/Xn4m3d/dms-rss-widget.git
cd dms-rss-widget

# the desktop card + ticker bar (required):
ln -s "$PWD/dankNewsRssTicker" ~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/dankNewsRssTicker

# optional — the in-bar pill companion:
ln -s "$PWD/dankNewsRssTickerPill" ~/.config/DankMaterialShell/plugins/dankNewsRssTickerPill

Reload DMS (Ctrl+Shift+R) or restart your compositor. To use the pill, add it to a bar section via Bar → Widgets (Left, Center or Right Section), then set Scrolling headlines to In the bar (pill) in either plugin's settings.

Configuration

Open Settings → Desktop Widgets → Dank News RSS & Ticker and use the tabs:

1. General — add feeds (or quick-add presets / OPML), refresh interval, max items, sort order, notifications
2. Card — name label, view mode, font size, background opacity, borders
3. Ticker bar — width/position, height, opacity, corners, border, fonts, item mode

Where the headlines scroll is a single choice — Off, On the desktop (ticker bar) or In the bar (pill) — shown identically in both panels, alongside a separate switch for the desktop card's visibility. Only one location can be active at a time.

The pill's own appearance (width, speed, separator, source label, pause on hover) lives in Settings → Plugins → Dank News RSS & Ticker Pill.

Requirements

• DankMaterialShell >= 1.2.0
• curl (used for fetching feeds)

Testing

The core feed-parsing logic is mirrored in a standalone JS module (dankNewsRssTicker/feed-parser-tests/feed-parser.js) so it can be unit-tested with Node.js without the QML runtime.

node --test dankNewsRssTicker/feed-parser-tests/feed-parser.test.js

Requires Node.js 18+ (uses the built-in node:test runner). 76 tests across 13 suites cover tag extraction, CDATA, HTML entity decoding, RSS/Atom parsing, root-element routing, namespace-prefixed Atom, image extraction, relative timestamps and OPML import.

Screenshots

License

MIT — the original work is © @BrendonJL and contributors (see the upstream repository). Changes in this fork are released under the same MIT license.