Burgr – Books in Your Terminal
blubsblog.bearblog.dev
blubsblog.bearblog.dev
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...
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.
Like the OP, I spend all day in tmux these days, which is in many ways the most superior UI[3]. As a bonus, CLI tools are often cross-platform and very easy to write.
1: https://github.com/soywod/himalaya
2: https://shttps://sr.ht/~psic4t/qcal/r.ht/~psic4t/qcal/
3: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer....
I also find fzf to be very good for building simple UIs. In fact I saw ways to do 80% of burgr with a few lines of fzf; composable tools really are the bee's knees
You may find you have you actually created a MVP of something that would be appreciated by many users even though I Am The Only User?!
So there's hope.
I'm reminded of my favorite Zappa quote:
The crux of the biscuit is: If it entertains you, fine. Enjoy it. If it doesn't, then blow it out your ass. I do it to amuse myself. If I like it, I release it. If somebody else likes it, that's a bonus.
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
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.
It's in my mind akin to the master craftsperson perfecting their work over the years.
True vocation.
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!
There are also...less legal places to find ebooks, but that goes without saying.