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Show HN: Fltrdr – A TUI Text Reader for the Terminal

78 points by octobanana 8y ago

octobanana 8y ago
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 https://octobanana.com/blog/terminal-text-reader-demo It can be found here on GitHub: https://github.com/octobanana/fltrdr https://github.com/octobanana/fltrdr It can also be found here on my personal site: https://octobanana.com/software/fltrdr https://octobanana.com/software/fltrdr
- nmstoker 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
  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.
lsh 8y ago
what is a 'TUI' ?
- innot 8y ago
  In gdb that stands for "Text user interface".
- cutety 8y ago
  Text-based User Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface
- syrrim 8y ago
  text user interface. A terminal interface that isn't restricted to a command line.
JdeBP 8y ago
* It is interesting to see this written in "modern" C++. * Those input handlers (you have three) are terrible; pattern matching is the wrong way to go about this. * You could no doubt get more imaginative with the progress bar using block characters. * Users will no doubt ask for the ability to suspend such a program; which, note, has to properly tear the whole UI down and set it back up again. * Users will also no doubt want this to work properly with the full range of Unicode text; you have not accounted for differing character widths, that I can see. Note that there exist zero-width characters and double-width characters. * vi sentence, paragraph, and section motions are of course actually {, }, (, ), [[, and ]]. Some help: * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/499139/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/499139/5132 * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/444270/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/444270/5132 * http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml * http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TerminalCapabilities.xml http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TerminalCapab... * https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/master/source/ECMA48Decoder.cpp#L290 https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/master/source/ECMA48Decod... * https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/master/source/TUIInputBase.cpp#L281 https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/master/source/TUIInputBas... * https://github.com/neovim/libtermkey/blob/master/driver-csi.c https://github.com/neovim/libtermkey/blob/master/driver-csi.... * https://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser https://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser
kissgyorgy 8y ago
a demo would be nice, something with https://asciinema.org https://asciinema.org or similar so we can get a feel of how it works without installing it.
- octobanana 8y ago
  This blog post from last week has two videos of it in action. The first one demos some of the features, while the second reads a bit of a book uninterrupted for 2 minutes. https://octobanana.com/blog/terminal-text-reader-demo https://octobanana.com/blog/terminal-text-reader-demo
yuchi 8y ago
Thanks for sharing! I’ve been searching for months for an idea to try out Rust, and now I think I found it! In case would you offend if I tried to port it?
- octobanana 8y ago
  I'd be stoked if you did, It would be interesting to see how the program would look in Rust.
SkyMarshal 8y ago
What does it read? Text files? Web sites? Maybe I missed it but I don’t see this mentioned on the github page.
- octobanana 8y ago
  It works best with any plain ASCII text. What I've been doing is taking PDF's and using `pdftotext` and `iconv` to convert documents into plain text. I'll add more information on this in the README.md to make it more clear what it reads.

78 points by octobanana 8y ago

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 https://octobanana.com/blog/terminal-text-reader-demo It can be found here on GitHub: https://github.com/octobanana/fltrdr https://github.com/octobanana/fltrdr It can also be found here on my personal site: https://octobanana.com/software/fltrdr https://octobanana.com/software/fltrdr

nmstoker 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
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.

lsh 8y ago

what is a 'TUI' ?

innot 8y ago
In gdb that stands for "Text user interface".
cutety 8y ago
Text-based User Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface
syrrim 8y ago
text user interface. A terminal interface that isn't restricted to a command line.

JdeBP 8y ago

* It is interesting to see this written in "modern" C++. * Those input handlers (you have three) are terrible; pattern matching is the wrong way to go about this. * You could no doubt get more imaginative with the progress bar using block characters. * Users will no doubt ask for the ability to suspend such a program; which, note, has to properly tear the whole UI down and set it back up again. * Users will also no doubt want this to work properly with the full range of Unicode text; you have not accounted for differing character widths, that I can see. Note that there exist zero-width characters and double-width characters. * vi sentence, paragraph, and section motions are of course actually {, }, (, ), [[, and ]]. Some help: * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/499139/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/499139/5132 * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/444270/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/444270/5132 * http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml * http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TerminalCapabilities.xml http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TerminalCapab... * https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/master/source/ECMA48Decoder.cpp#L290 https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/master/source/ECMA48Decod... * https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/master/source/TUIInputBase.cpp#L281 https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/master/source/TUIInputBas... * https://github.com/neovim/libtermkey/blob/master/driver-csi.c https://github.com/neovim/libtermkey/blob/master/driver-csi.... * https://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser https://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser

kissgyorgy 8y ago

a demo would be nice, something with https://asciinema.org https://asciinema.org or similar so we can get a feel of how it works without installing it.

octobanana 8y ago
This blog post from last week has two videos of it in action. The first one demos some of the features, while the second reads a bit of a book uninterrupted for 2 minutes. https://octobanana.com/blog/terminal-text-reader-demo https://octobanana.com/blog/terminal-text-reader-demo

yuchi 8y ago

Thanks for sharing! I’ve been searching for months for an idea to try out Rust, and now I think I found it! In case would you offend if I tried to port it?

octobanana 8y ago
I'd be stoked if you did, It would be interesting to see how the program would look in Rust.

SkyMarshal 8y ago

What does it read? Text files? Web sites? Maybe I missed it but I don’t see this mentioned on the github page.

octobanana 8y ago
It works best with any plain ASCII text. What I've been doing is taking PDF's and using `pdftotext` and `iconv` to convert documents into plain text. I'll add more information on this in the README.md to make it more clear what it reads.