[octobanana]

For the past month, I've been working on this terminal text reader project for fun. It started out as a project to learn more about how to structure and implement a text-based user interface with vi inspired features. It's written in C++17 and is released under the MIT license. I wanted to share it here in case someone may find it interesting.

Fltrdr, or flat-reader, is an interactive text reader for the terminal. It is flat in the sense that the reader is word-based. It creates a horizontal stream of words, ignoring all newline characters and reducing sequential whitespace. Its purpose is to facilitate reading, scanning, and searching text. The program also has a play mode that moves the reader forward one word at a time, along with a configurable words per minute (WPM) setting.

It is highly customizable, with a configuration file to persist your settings. The colourscheme can be changed to match your environments theme using either 24-bit, 8-bit, or 4-bit colours, depending on what your terminal supports. The characters used for the text border and progress bar can be set to a character or unicode-character of your choice. Some of the UI elements, such as the border, progress bar, and status bar can be individually shown/hidden to create a more minimalistic display.

I'm open to any feedback or suggestions!

This blog post from the other week contains videos of it in action: https://octobanana.com/blog/terminal-text-reader-demo

It can be found here on GitHub: https://github.com/octobanana/fltrdr

It can also be found here on my personal site: https://octobanana.com/software/fltrdr

[nmstoker]

Thanks for posting this.

One bit of feedback: I think the video should be linked more prominently and from the README - I guessed that might be what it was for the description is a bit vague and abstract and "seeing is believing"

[codetrotter]

Agreed, put a screenshot of the video with a play button at the top of the README and link it to the video.

Also, make the video get to the point quicker. Open a file and start reading right away.

[octobanana]

That's a good idea, thanks! I'll make an updated video of it and add a link to it in the README.md.

[fouc]

alternatively, make an animated gif to replace the static image.

an animated gif made from a portion of that second video on that blog post would be pretty good I think.

[laumars]

Looks good.

From a personal point of view, I don't like projects that have missing letters in the name. I find them confusing to read and harder to type (even after I've learned how to pronounce it). In fact even after using `nginx` for years, I still get stuck which letters to type if ever I interrupt my muscle memory.

eg I'm in the terminal and I want to launch flat-reader... now which letters do I type and which do I ignore?

If you're after something that's less keystrokes to launch then I much prefer the approach of applications like Visual Studio Code (`code`) or Sublime Text (`subl3`) that take a portion of the name. So you could have something like `flatr`.

That all said, you're never going to please everyone when it comes to naming things to I expect (hope) you do take my thoughts here with a pinch of salt :)

As for the reader itself; it looks like a lot of thought has gone into it. Good work there.