An RSS ticker for your Mac desktop

What an RSS ticker is

An RSS feed is the list of new posts a site publishes for software to read. A ticker turns that list into one line of headlines that moves across your screen. You read it when you glance at it and ignore it the rest of the time. It doesn’t pop up or ask for a click.

People mean three different things by an RSS ticker. One runs on your own desktop, for you to read while you work: that is FeedsBar, and what this page covers. One runs on a website, to show your feed to visitors: that is a widget you embed in a page, and several web services sell them. One runs on a stream or a lobby screen, and that belongs in your broadcast or digital signage software.

If you want headlines on a spare monitor or the screen on the wall, rather than along the edge of the one you work at, the FeedsBar board does that full screen in a browser.

Set one up on a Mac

1. Download FeedsBar and start the 30-day trial. It needs macOS 14 or later.
2. Open Settings, choose the RSS tab, and paste a feed’s URL.
3. FeedsBar checks that the URL really is an RSS or Atom feed. The moment it does, the feed’s headlines join the ticker.
4. Add up to 20 feeds of your own. Each one is checked for new posts every 15 minutes.

The ticker sits along the top or bottom of the display you choose. You can set its speed anywhere from half speed to ten times normal. Hover over it to pause, and click a headline to open the story in your browser.

You can add a second ticker under the first. It scrolls the other way and has its own mix, speed, size and background. The mix can be the latest headlines, a shuffle, one category from our catalog, the Music Lane or market quotes.

Keep it to what you care about

In the Filters tab, a muted phrase hides every headline that contains it. A followed phrase pulls matching headlines to the front. A single word matches whole words only, so muting “ai” does not hide “Ukraine”. You can also dim the headlines you have already opened.

Where to find a feed's URL

Most blogs and news sites publish a feed, even when they do not link to it. If a site shows no RSS link, try adding /feed or /rss to its address. If you paste a web page instead of a feed, FeedsBar says so and suggests exactly that.

• The best RSS feeds lists the strongest sources by category, each with its feed URL ready to copy.
• The Signal 500 has a page for every source we carry, with its feed URL and how it scores.
• A YouTube channel’s feed is youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= followed by the channel’s ID.
• Reddit ends RSS on November 13, 2026. Our Reddit page has a working feed for what 25 big subreddits link to.

Your feeds stay on your Mac

FeedsBar fetches the feeds you add from your Mac directly, and they stay out of our shared catalog. There is no account. Your feeds, filters and reading history stay on your Mac (privacy policy).

Other RSS tickers for the Mac

There are not many. Our survey of Mac ticker apps lists the alternatives, each with the date it last shipped, checked against Apple and GitHub. Most of them sit in the menu bar rather than along the edge of the screen. If you are weighing FeedsBar against a full RSS reader instead, our comparison covers that row by row, including the one where a reader beats us: it takes unlimited feeds, and FeedsBar takes 20 of your own.