I’ve never read books from a computer, it’s always a phone, a tablet, or an eink reader. Somehow reading a long-form text without being able to hold the medium in my hand feels wrong.
Am I missing a convenient experience? I’d like to hear stories from computer-using readers.
Sure, i use epy[1] and every month i d/l my books from amazon that i have bought, dedrm[2] through calibre and save the epubs to a folder. Its not a particularly arduous task.
When i want to read i have an alias setup along the lines of:
epy "$(fzf)"
its a nice interface ;-)
Now i don't often read full books in the terminal, BUT i do like being able to reference bits that i remember at a VERY quick speed. I recently was talking to somoene about biases we bring to statistics and could remember reading a great anecdote about it, using rga[3] i was able to bring up the passage VERY quickly in the terminal
I've tried it on a PC and didn't like it. I think to some extent it's having ereaders and books front-lit that makes them easier on the eyes for me, rather than having it backlit. Ironic I suppose because I stare at a laptop screen all day...
This is neat, but why would you want to read books in a monospaced font? Proportional and serif fonts exist for a reason: they make long paragraphs of text more pleasant to read. Words can be better identified by their shape, which makes them easier to distinguish at a glance.
I suppose you could have a separate terminal configuration with a different font for this app, but standalone reader apps or, better yet, e-ink devices, do a much better job of making text easier to read for long periods of time.
We are still quite far from having truly "pleasant to read" long-form text in our computers or browsers. Real typesetting programs use optimized line setting and micro-adjustments in typography to make long stretches of text a bit easier on the eyes, but there's no support for this either in browsers or in most word processors intended for basic office use.
>This is neat, but why would you want to read books in a monospaced font?
You might be surprised. For example, Chinese and Japanese very commonly use monospaced fonts.
On a less pedantic note, personally I find monospaced fonts slightly easier to see and read. Everything is uniform and organized, which makes eye movements simpler and easier.
I, and many people, just don't want to read a book in monospaced font, sat at a desk with a desktop PC/laptop.
I'd take a Kindle/e-reader over that setup any day. I can read in bed, on a bench outside, in 10/15 minute gaps throughout the day, can make a 2 hour train/bus ride fly past. The most pleasant of all is sitting under a tree on a spring/summer day.
Neat project nonetheless. Any reading is better than no reading.
While I agree that dead trees and e-ink are far superior to reading in a terminal, it's not so bad, even with aging eyes.
In some ways is kind of soothing, as long as you have the brightness and contrast set appropriately.
Back when the internet was all text, there were people in the UK who would transcribe their favorite television shows into text files. UUCPing or cating these scripts into a local machine was the only source of British humor in some parts of the world.
I read the entirety of Red Dwarf as fan-transcribed text files on a terminal 15 years before I was able to see it in video.
As a kid in my sophomore year of high school, I read the whole 3.0.0 Jargon File on the 15" CRT of my 386 - in Turbo Pascal, because it was the only thing I had that could open so large a file. (A whole megabyte! I messed around with building an index and a per-entry viewer, but never got very far because my motivation was limited by being able to just read the file directly.)
I'd "borrowed" the Turbo Pascal installer via an understanding undergrad at the local college, who was perfectly eager to help expand my horizons; the Jargon File came by way of the shovelware directories that old video game magazine cover CDs used to have. Poor as I would later come to know it to be, it was still my first real exposure to the idea of a subculture built around computers and their use, and the first thing that gave me to realize that there might be a larger social context into which my until then small-town and very solitary style of weirdness might fit - which I like to think was more or less what the fellow nerds who put together the CD master had in mind. (That, and maybe a bit of "how you gonna keep him down on the farm?" puckishness...)
I wouldn't want to go back to just reading from a CRT, though. Phone screens being as far from ideal as they are, they're still much better at rendering text, and considerably wieldier especially in bed.
Monospaced fonts are not hard to read, if you like what you're reading, after a couple of minutes you won't even notice the font anymore. Besides, coders are used to read long texts in monospace, and people used to do that before GUIs without issues.
It's about easy of use and workflows.
Most of the desktop apps and websites don't care about keyboard navigation (and usability) and you have to use the mouse no matter what.
When your main workflow is keyboard based, changing to the mouse and back to keyboard is very disruptive. When you use a tiling window manager such as Sway or i3 this is even more important.
Also, TUI applications go straight to the point, load extremely fast and barely use any computer resources.
For some, I think they reached a state of it being so flexible that other concerns, like proper typesetting in this case, are simply not important. This hasn't happened for me, at least, who tried once or twice to try to use Emacs as a mail client. There was more massive unknown tradeoffs as opposed to just using a dedicated GUI client or webmail, particularly in relation to the type of email people send (heavy HTML emails sent by default from email clients.)
Regardless, I do like a lot of things being in the terminal and tend to reach for that first or Emacs dired even for even basic file manipulation instead of the Dolphin (KDE's file manager) just because of habit. It's just easier in a lot of cases.
Context switching and keyboard skills. Part of me wishes I had those skills, but at the moment I still reach for my mouse frequently. I don't have the time or brain plasticity to learn how to terminal only, and there's always tons of setup-while-learning to do.
I had a lot of trouble remembering keybindings for Vim (and I'm still not very good at coming up with incantations to manipulate text at scale) until I installed Tridactyl for Firefox. Vimium is the Chromium-based equivalent.
If you touch type it's a great tool, you barely ever need to leave home row anymore.
When your vision is not very good, the terminal has one big advantage: the same font size and same contrast for everything (I use VT100 mode, so no colors).
I have recently upgraded to a 150-dpi monitor, and now pretty much all graphical programs are unusable, because I cannot even find the menu item to increase the font size without a magnifying glass, and even then most programs do not let you change the UI font size. Terminal for everything is a great remedy for all these troubles.
To put it bluntly, where the source code at? I realize OP is the only user and probably doesn't want to deal with feadback, etc, but I'd love to tinker with/use this.
If you want books for free legally, project Gutenberg has a lot of public domain books. You can also get ebooks from popular bookstores like Books a Million that give you access to the file directly.
There are also...less legal places to find ebooks, but that goes without saying.
There's a beauty in people finding and fixing these seemingly tiny gaps in their daily lives. It reeks of the serenity in someone's world where 1) this is a problem they're willing to invest time in, 2) they have the time to resolve the problem, and 3) they seem to really enjoy it.
It's in my mind akin to the master craftsperson perfecting their work over the years.
I love it! The double spaced text looks very easy on the eye and it will work especially well on a phone / tablet with a shell. Is burgr published and can I install it? Ship it with some free books too!
I wrote something similar in sophomore year of college. It didn't work quite as well as this does because I was a noob and wrote it in C/ncurses. Got me a job because it impressed the interviewer. Read all of Kevin mitnick's Ghost in the Wires on it
I primarily program in Python and C# so pardon my ignorance...whats wrong with ncurses? I am currently writing a text editor in it and it seems like a decent framework
As the other of a once popular text editor. I have been writing a new generation editor. Perhaps we could talk about important features and design ideas together and each use one another as a sounding board?
When it comes to C/C++ I am a total noob lol. I am mostly trying to learn it on my own right now since those two languages have mad staying power, so I was trying to write a text editor in ncurses
84 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/wustho/epr
https://github.com/wustho/epy
Am I missing a convenient experience? I’d like to hear stories from computer-using readers.
When i want to read i have an alias setup along the lines of:
epy "$(fzf)"
its a nice interface ;-)
Now i don't often read full books in the terminal, BUT i do like being able to reference bits that i remember at a VERY quick speed. I recently was talking to somoene about biases we bring to statistics and could remember reading a great anecdote about it, using rga[3] i was able to bring up the passage VERY quickly in the terminal
Like most great cli tools, its about the workflow
[1] https://github.com/wustho/epy [2] https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools/ [3] https://github.com/phiresky/ripgrep-all
The rest are in my phone.
I suppose you could have a separate terminal configuration with a different font for this app, but standalone reader apps or, better yet, e-ink devices, do a much better job of making text easier to read for long periods of time.
You might be surprised. For example, Chinese and Japanese very commonly use monospaced fonts.
On a less pedantic note, personally I find monospaced fonts slightly easier to see and read. Everything is uniform and organized, which makes eye movements simpler and easier.
Unless you’re reading one letter at a time, consciously moving your eyes from one to the next, I’m struggling to see how that would be the case.
Isn't it great to live in a time with so many options?
I, and many people, just don't want to read a book in monospaced font, sat at a desk with a desktop PC/laptop.
I'd take a Kindle/e-reader over that setup any day. I can read in bed, on a bench outside, in 10/15 minute gaps throughout the day, can make a 2 hour train/bus ride fly past. The most pleasant of all is sitting under a tree on a spring/summer day.
Neat project nonetheless. Any reading is better than no reading.
In some ways is kind of soothing, as long as you have the brightness and contrast set appropriately.
Back when the internet was all text, there were people in the UK who would transcribe their favorite television shows into text files. UUCPing or cating these scripts into a local machine was the only source of British humor in some parts of the world.
I read the entirety of Red Dwarf as fan-transcribed text files on a terminal 15 years before I was able to see it in video.
I'd "borrowed" the Turbo Pascal installer via an understanding undergrad at the local college, who was perfectly eager to help expand my horizons; the Jargon File came by way of the shovelware directories that old video game magazine cover CDs used to have. Poor as I would later come to know it to be, it was still my first real exposure to the idea of a subculture built around computers and their use, and the first thing that gave me to realize that there might be a larger social context into which my until then small-town and very solitary style of weirdness might fit - which I like to think was more or less what the fellow nerds who put together the CD master had in mind. (That, and maybe a bit of "how you gonna keep him down on the farm?" puckishness...)
I wouldn't want to go back to just reading from a CRT, though. Phone screens being as far from ideal as they are, they're still much better at rendering text, and considerably wieldier especially in bed.
Does it need any other justification or explanation?
"Readers read best what they read most." - Zuzana Licko
Also, if you want to go down the rabbit hole, some good studies have been conducted on this subject [1].
[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-readin...
haha
It's about easy of use and workflows. Most of the desktop apps and websites don't care about keyboard navigation (and usability) and you have to use the mouse no matter what.
When your main workflow is keyboard based, changing to the mouse and back to keyboard is very disruptive. When you use a tiling window manager such as Sway or i3 this is even more important.
Also, TUI applications go straight to the point, load extremely fast and barely use any computer resources.
Regardless, I do like a lot of things being in the terminal and tend to reach for that first or Emacs dired even for even basic file manipulation instead of the Dolphin (KDE's file manager) just because of habit. It's just easier in a lot of cases.
If you touch type it's a great tool, you barely ever need to leave home row anymore.
e.g. rxvt can use different fonts for regular and bold text.
I have recently upgraded to a 150-dpi monitor, and now pretty much all graphical programs are unusable, because I cannot even find the menu item to increase the font size without a magnifying glass, and even then most programs do not let you change the UI font size. Terminal for everything is a great remedy for all these troubles.
One of the few exceptions would be reading a novel, though :)
Terminal means fast and low latency
There are also...less legal places to find ebooks, but that goes without saying.
It's in my mind akin to the master craftsperson perfecting their work over the years.
True vocation.
https://github.com/shortrounddev/books
I was reading your post on software that will run 20 years from now. What about perl?
My perl scripts, and maybe awk, too, are the only ones running after 25 years!
The optics to management: “they are always at their desk in their terminal, they’re getting work done!”
They ended up “departing” shortly after a new person joined and called it out in a meeting.