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

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

#11

Post by octobanana »

nmstoker wrote: post #7
octobanana wrote: post #2

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…

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"

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

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

#13

Post by octobanana »

yuchi wrote: post #12

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?

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

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

#14

Post by JdeBP »

* 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/444270/5132

* http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml

* http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TerminalCapab...

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/master/source/ECMA48Decod...

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/master/source/TUIInputBas...

* https://github.com/neovim/libtermkey/blob/master/driver-csi....

* https://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser

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

#15

Post by laumars »

octobanana wrote: post #2

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…

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.

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

#16

Post by fouc »

octobanana wrote: post #11
nmstoker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

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

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.

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

#18

Post by octobanana »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #17

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

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.
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