Let me be honest with you up front.
You probably already have a feed reader. Maybe it's Feedly, maybe Inoreader, maybe — like me — it's FeedBro riding along in your browser. And you like it. It's fast, it's tidy, it does exactly what a feed reader is supposed to do.
Chervil is not going to beat it. I'm not going to pretend a feature I built in a week is a better reader than a tool someone has polished for years. So I didn't try.
0.21.0 does the thing a feed reader structurally can't. It reads your feeds for you.
"Summarize the feeds in the Entertainment folder"
Here's the whole feature in one sentence you can actually type.
You subscribe to your sources. Chervil pulls them quietly in the background. And then, in the sidebar, you ask — in plain language, the way you'd ask a person who'd been keeping an eye on things:
Summarize the feeds in the Entertainment folder
Sprig goes to your feeds — not the web — pulls what came in, and hands you a briefing. Grouped by theme, not dumped in reverse-chronological order. Ranked by what actually matters, not by what happened to arrive last. Every item linked straight back to the source, so the brief is a table of contents for your attention, not a replacement for the reading.
That's the part a feed reader can't do. It can show you a list — that's the easy part, and honestly the part it does better than Chervil ever will. What it can't do is read across the whole thing and tell you the three items worth your morning and the forty that aren't. A browser with a frontier model behind it can. So that's the job I gave it.
Click any item in the brief and it opens in a new tab — your summary stays put, home base, right where you left it.
Bring your feeds with you
Nobody is retyping two hundred subscriptions into a form. So they don't have to.
Export an OPML file from whatever you use now — every reader has the button — and drop it into Library → Feeds → ⤒ Import OPML. Chervil brings the whole list over, folders and all. Your "Tech" folder stays a Tech folder. Duplicates are skipped. And because pulling two hundred feeds every hour would be rude to both your machine and everyone's servers, a big import quietly defaults to once a day.
RSS and Atom, blogs and newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, subreddits. No API keys. No accounts.
The browser advantage: subscribe from anywhere
A feed reader is a box you go to. Chervil is already on the page.
So when a site you're reading offers a feed, a small 📡 just appears in the toolbar — one click and you're subscribed. And when it doesn't advertise one, right-click anywhere and pick Check this page for RSS feeds; Chervil goes looking and usually finds it anyway. No extension to install, no permission prompt, because the browser doesn't need permission to notice something about the page it's already showing you.
That's the recurring theme of this whole release, actually: Chervil isn't bolting a feed reader onto the side. It already is the thing standing between you and every page. It might as well use that.
A standing morning brief
The ask-in-the-sidebar version is great when you think of it. But the best version is the one you never have to remember.
Add the built-in PulseKeeper agent — it's in 👤 Agents, under starter agents — and give it a schedule. Eight in the morning, say. It quietly composes a digest of everything that came in overnight and pings you when it's ready. You open your laptop to a briefing of your own sources, already written.
(PulseKeeper started life as a separate little app of mine. Its feed-reading guts made a lot more sense living inside the browser than sitting in the tray next to it, so they moved in.)
Point an agent at a single folder and it briefs only that one — a Tech agent, a News agent, whatever you like. Feeds like these are just fuel; the agent decides what to make of them.
The furniture, kept deliberately light
There's real management here, but I tried hard to keep it to managing, not reading:
- Folders — collapsible, brought in from your OPML or assigned from a feed's ⚙ settings. They're also how you scope a brief.
- Per-feed retention — keep a firehose subreddit for a day and a favorite blog for a year. Each feed decides for itself, instead of one blanket rule.
- Bulk select and delete — after importing a big list, hit Select, check the ones that didn't earn their place, and clear them out at once.
All of it tucks into an expandable row, so the list stays a list until you want to fuss with one.
Where it lives, and what leaves
The feeds you read are yours, and this feature treats them that way.
Feed items are stored locally — in the same private index that keeps your reading, but walled off from it, so a busy morning of feeds can never crowd out Chervil's sense of what you've actually been reading about. Nothing gets summarized until you ask. The only thing that ever leaves your machine is the briefing you request, at the moment you request it — the same as attaching a file. Your subscriptions sync between your computers; what each machine has already pulled stays on that machine.
The Library grew up
One more thing you'll feel immediately: the Library is a real page now, not a pop-up that dims the whole window.
It opens in its own tab, exactly like Settings did last release — back and forward work, it remembers which section and search you left it on, and Feeds lives there alongside your Pages, Sites, Favorites, Collections, and Downloads. Two sections got clearer names while I was in there: Pages (the ones Sprig composed for you) and Sites (the ones you've visited).
Also in 0.21.0
- First launch stopped freezing. If your data lives in a OneDrive folder, Chervil used to lock up on open while the cloud re-downloaded your session file. That read happens off the main thread now — the window comes up responsive while the file catches up.
- Paste an image or a file straight into the prompt with Ctrl/⌘-V, same as dragging it in. A pasted screenshot attaches as an image.
- A copy button on every chat message — yours and Sprig's — because selecting text by hand to copy a reply is exactly the kind of small friction that shouldn't exist.
- Settings and Library sections start at the top when you switch to them, instead of stranding you halfway down where the last one was.
Chervil is free and open source. Grab 0.21.0.
And the pitch, one more time, plainly: keep your feed reader. Really. But point your feeds at Chervil too, and let the browser do the one thing the reader can't — read them, and tell you what's worth your time.