A few hours ago, I have read about Spritz, a new speed-reading app, and I was quite impressed by the idea. I know the underlying concept is not new and I didn’t even try out Spritz itself (they announce their idea but not release the software, huh?), but this was the first time I have heard about it and I really liked it!
So I decided to implement my own terminal version of this idea, acting as a regular command-line filter. Find the new tool speedread at:
https://github.com/pasky/speedread
(Yes, it may not work well for beletry. Or slides. Yes, it may not work well for emails that you want to just skim for keywords. But then there’s the other 80% of text I need to chew through that does not fall in either category. I’ll have to continue trying it out for longer but it might be really useful.)
Meanwhile, I have also learned about OpenSpritz, a web-based implementation of Spritz. Can be a good match for speedread!
Few years ago, as a school project I have written hed. It’s yet another terminal hexadecimal editor, but with few unique features.
Thanks to its splay tree file representation, it is able to very efficiently handle editing and even inserting to huge files; the file is not loaded in memory as a whole, just the modified parts are saved, and therefore you are able to edit even files many gigabytes in size efficiently. You can also save just the swap file separately as a “working diff” and restore your changes later on top of unmodified original file.
It uses vi-like keybindings (including marks and yank/paste registers or :!). It also features an “expression” concept that lets you efficiently compose search, substitute or jump expressions composed from a variety of data representations, supporting arithmetic operators and register references. E.g. using special register “. (data under cursor), you can use command #”. to jump to file offset written under cursor.
I’m writing about it again now since I just pushed out Debian packaging for the editor, so you can easily make Debian or Ubuntu packages for yourself from the source (it also has existing OpenSUSE packaging). Try it out! I’m not maintaining the project anymore, but Petr Tesarik will gladly accept any patches or feedback (or I will too, forwarding it to him :-).
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