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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 impleme

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.

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.