Wombag - A Wallabag client for Emacs

Wombag is a Wallabag client for Emacs.

Wallabag is an (optionally self-hosted) Read-It-Later and archiving service for web pages, like Pocket or Instapaper.

Installation

Please Note: Wombag requires at least Emacs 28.1 and a recent-ish server-side installation of Wallabag (v2.6.0 or higher). You can check your Wallabag version from the web interface.

Install using your package manager of choice, or clone this repo and run package-install-file on the cloned directory.

Setup and Usage

(use-package wombag
  :config
  (setq wombag-host "https://app.wallabag.it" ;where you access Wallabag
        wombag-username "my-wallabag-username"
        wombag-password "my-wallabag-password"
        wombag-client-id "abcdefgh1234"
        wombag-client-secret "abcdefgh1234"))

Consider obfuscating your password and client secret here using auth-source or some other mechanism. There are other customization options, which see.

To use it, run wombag.

Run wombag-sync to sync the local database. It may take a while the first time.

In the Wombag buffer

If you have used Elfeed before you should feel at home.

• Press s to search for articles, ? for help when searching.
• Sync with the server with wombag-sync (G).
• You can archive (A), star (F), tag (+) or delete (D) entries.
• Removing tags is not supported yet.

Anywhere in Emacs

To add a URL to Wallabag, you can run M-x wombag-add-entry.

Quality of life features

Wombag provides a few QoL features.

Full-featured text search

You can filter the search listing incrementally using any combination of criteria.

In this demo I filter the listing to articles that mention Julia in the title, added between 2021 and 2023, are not archived, and contain the text automatic differentiation:

wombag-search.mp4

You can search by text, tags, title, author, URL, date published, date added, starred/archived status and more.

Saves your place

Wombag saves your place in articles. You can also show only partly-read articles when searching (press ?), or call M-x wombag-resume from anywhere.

imenu support

Jump between article sections with imenu:

The above image is with consult-imenu. Any imenu-based command will work (including just imenu).

Bookmark support

You can bookmark search results or individual articles.

Org-link support

(Not yet implemented)

How it works

Wombag uses a local sqlite database to store your Wallabag entries and Emacs as a front-end. Remote to local syncing is incremental and based on the last sync time. Local changes are propagated to the remote instantaneously and requires an Internet connection.

Comparison with wallabag.el

I needed something that could work smoothly with my decades-old reading list of 15K+ articles. I could not get wallabag.el, a pre-existing Wallabag client for Emacs, to sync correctly or to work without freezing Emacs. This is a smaller, stripped down rewrite of the package – no code is shared except for a couple of face definitions.

• wallabag.el has many features Wombag doesn’t: annotation support, ivy integration, image caching, bulk action support via marking entries and more customization options.
• Wombag has a 12-25x lower memory footprint, more consistent syncing and graceful error handling, better search and many quality of life features.

For more information on the differences see this thread.

Known issues

• Deleting articles from the web interface or a different client will not cause them to be deleted from the local database when syncing. This is a known limitation of the Wallabag API. This can be done by doing a full (as opposed to incremental) sync, which Wombag does not (officially) support. Note that all local changes (including deletions) are always reflected server-side.
• Removing tags is not implemented due to Wallabag API issues.

Acknowledgments

• Damon Chan for writing wallabag.el, the inspiration for this package.
• Chris Wellons for writing Elfeed, the other inspiration for this package. He also authored emacsql, which Wombag uses.