Hullcaster is a terminal-based podcast manager, built-in Rust. It provides a terminal UI (i.e., an ncurses-like interface) to allow users to subscribe to podcast feeds, and sync feeds to check for new episodes. Episodes may be downloaded locally, played with an internal or external media player, and marked as played/unplayed. Key bindings and other options are configurable via a config file.

This is a fork of shellcaster, which is no longer maintained. Currently, I am planning to implement the features stated below, while learning rust at the same time.

• Option to avoid marking as read when playing
• Syncing with the gpodder API
• Add playing queue
• Internal Player using rodio
• Show key bindings in a bar on the bottom
• Migrate to ratatui
• Add option to sync automatically on start, enabled by default
• Add periodic synchronization
• Migrate from threads to tokio

The package is available in the AUR hullcaster-git.

paru -S hullcaster-git

With flakes enabled, run:

nix run github:gilcu3/hullcaster

cargo binstall --git https://github.com/gilcu3/hullcaster hullcaster

First, ensure you have installed the necessary dependencies: rust, gcc, pkgconf, sqlite (package names in Archlinux).

Next, you can clone the Github repo and compile it yourself:

git clone https://github.com/gilcu3/hullcaster.git
cd hullcaster
cargo build --release --locked # add or remove any features with --features

# no root permissions
cp target/release/hullcaster ~/.local/bin

In your terminal, run:

hullcaster

Note that if you installed hullcaster to a different location, ensure that this location has been added to your $PATH:

export PATH="/path/to/add:$PATH"

Hullcaster supports importing OPML files from other podcast managers. If you can export to an OPML file from another podcast manager, you can import this file with:

hullcaster import -f /path/to/OPML/file.opml

If the -r flag is added to this command, it will overwrite any existing podcasts that are currently stored in hullcaster. You can also pipe in data to hullcaster import from stdin by not specifying the -f <file>.

You can export an OPML file from hullcaster with the following command:

hullcaster export -f /path/to/output/file.opml

You can also export to stdout by not specifying the -f <file>; for example, this command is equivalent:

hullcaster export > /path/to/output/file.opml

If you want to change configuration settings, the sample config.toml file can be copied from config.toml. Download it, edit it to your fancy, and place it in the following location:

# on Linux
mkdir -p ~/.config/hullcaster
cp config.toml ~/.config/hullcaster/

Or you can put config.toml in a place of your choosing, and specify the location at runtime:

hullcaster -c /path/to/config.toml

The sample file above provides comments that should walk you through all the available options. If any field does not appear in the config file, it will be filled in with the default value specified in those comments.

Note: Actions can be mapped to more than one key, but a single key may not do more than one action (e.g., you can't set "d" to both download and delete episodes).

You can set the colors in the app with either built-in terminal colors or (provided your terminal supports it) customizable colors as well. See the "colors" section in the config.toml for details about how to specify these colors!

Some users may wish to sync their podcasts automatically on a regular basis, e.g., every morning. The hullcaster sync subcommand can be used to do this without opening up the UI, and does a full sync of all podcasts in the database. This could be used to set up a cron job or systemd timer, for example. Please refer to the relevant documentation for these systems for setting it up on the schedule of your choice.