Reading "fost" at no cost

Do you, like me, have too much long-form text to read on your computer and not enough time to read it all? The solution is easier than you think.

There are speed-reading “apps” that can help you to read text in a website at a much faster pace than you would normally do. If I am not mistaken, Spritz was the original one. I don’t use my cellphone much, so an app is useless to me, and Spritz’s solution for PCs is a browser plugin. Maybe it would work for you, but I just don’t like its interface.

I decided to look for alternatives. I needed something that would help me speed-read any text on my PC and do it in a way that didn’t irritate me or get in my way ‒ and ideally, it would be something open source as well. I stumbled upon some CLI programs which met my requirements, but how was I going to easily input random text into these without having to put in much effort on my side? I know I sound lazy now, but if I’m trying to improve my productivity, then giving myself a bunch of extra work isn’t going to help.

The solution was dead simple, and when I realised it I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen something like this before. Just use the clipboard! I’ll write a small wrapper script to feed the current content of the clipboard into the speed-reading program, and with a single command I can speed read any text on my computer.

The CLI script I settled on was this simple but elegant Perl script. There’s been one commit since 2016, so I’ve kept a fork for just in case.

Save this Perl script on your PC as ~/bin/speedread.

Now for the wrapper script. Create ~/bin/fost with the following contents:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Uncomment the line that is relevant to your display manager:

## xorg:
# content=$(xclip -o)
## wayland:
# content=$(wl-paste -p)

countdown="10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1"; combi="$countdown $content"; echo $combi | speedread -w 300

I’ve added a countdown ‒ feel free to remove it. The -w 300 flag sets the default reading speed in wpm.

Now give both these scripts execution privileges.

Now you can select any text on your PC, type fost into a terminal, and you are speed reading through whatever you want. And it’s all with open source code too!