About me: My name is Solène Rapenne, pronouns she/her. I like learning and sharing knowledge. Hobbies: '(BSD OpenBSD Qubes OS Lisp cmdline gaming security QubesOS internet-stuff). I love percent and lambda characters. OpenBSD developer solene@. No AI is involved in this blog.

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Autoscrolling text for lazy reading

Written by Solène, on 17 May 2018.
Tags: #unix

Comments on Fediverse/Mastodon

Today I found a software named Lazyread which can read and display file an autoscroll at a chosen speed. I had to read its source code to make it work, the documentation isn’t very helpful, it doesn’t read ebooks (as in epub or mobi format) and doesn’t support stdin… This software requires some C code + a shell wrapper to works, it’s complicated for only scrolling.

So, after thinking a few minutes, the autoscroll can be reproduced easily with a very simple awk command. Of course, it will not have the interactive keys like lazyread to increase/decrease speed or some others options, but the most important part is there: autoscrolling.

If you want to read a file with a rate of 1 line per 700 millisecond, just type the following command:

$ awk '{system("sleep 0.7");print}' file

Do you want to read an html file (documentation file on the disk or from the web), you can use lynx or w3m to convert the html file on the fly to a readable text and pass it to awk stdin.

$ w3m -dump doc/slsh/slshfun-2.html | awk '{system("sleep 0.7");print}'
$ lynx -dump doc/slsh/slshfun-2.html | awk '{system("sleep 0.7");print}'
$ w3m -dump https://dataswamp.org/~solene/ | awk '{system("sleep 0.7");print}'

Maybe you want to read a man page?

$ man awk | awk '{system("sleep 0.7");print}'

If you want to pause the reading, you can use the true unix way, Ctrl+Z to send a signal which will stop the command and let it paused in background. You can resume the reading by typing fg.

One could easily write a little script parsing parameters for setting the speed or handling files or url with the correct command.

Notes: If for some reasons you try to use lazyread, fix the shebang in the file lesspipe.sh and you will need to call lazyread binary with the environment variable LESSOPEN="|./lesspipe.sh %s" (the path of the script if needed). Without this variable, you will have a very helpful error “file not found”.