Terminal Reader Mode with Pandoc and Less

| tui |

The other day Aosheng send me an article to read from the verge. When I tried to read it, it took about 5 minutes to load because of the 15 various JavaScript things that were running in addition to ads loading in the background. Firefox was unhappy, and even when I tried to turn on “Reader View” (which strips out all of the junk) it took another minute to load. I’ve been on a UNIX binge lately so I figured there had to be a clever hack to make my own reader view in a terminal. This is where pandoc comes to the rescue. I’ve written about this tool in the past discussing how to easily convert Markdown to PDF. It turns out that pandoc also supports arbitrary URL arguments which means that you can convert HTML files on the fly without having to download them first. This means that we can take an arbitrary URL, pass it into pandoc, and spit out plain text. Furthermore, we can pipe this into less to get a nice pager for longer documents. The full string is shown below:

pandoc -f html -t plain
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/4/15547314/edward-snowden-cory-doctorow-nypl-talk-walkaway
| less
In the example above, -f specifies the input filetype, in this case HTML. -t specifies the conversion filetype, in this case plain text. Pandoc supports a ton of different formats, you can read the man pagefor more info.

The next logical step is to make a script like my wordpress mutt posterto make this even easier. You could make a simple program called readerand put it in /usr/local/bin/reader. The contents of this script are:

1
2
3
4
5
6
 
#!/bin/bash
# Terminal Reader Mode using Pandoc and Less

url="$1"


pandoc -f html -t plain $url | less

You can then use this  by typing reader $URL.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Notes from Alexander Petros’ “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”

I loved this talk from Alexander Petros titled “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”. What follows is summation of my note-taking from watching the talk on YouTube. Is what you’re building for future generations: Useful for them? Maintainable by them? Adapt…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog May 14, 2025

Open Up, Episode 2: Fundamentals, Principles, Navigating an Imperfect World, Collaboration, and Old Friends

I’m late in posting this because boy oh boy, there’s been a lot going on. But Episode 2 of our show Open Up is out! Geoff and I tackled some great questions and covered a lot of ground in this […]

via Blog – Brad Frost May 14, 2025

Your license is a scam

Good morning. Good morning sir! How can I help you? Hello, hi. I was interested in buying one of your cars, the Model A. I really like it and it seems perfect for me. That’s an excellent choice! Model A is a great car, the price starts at 20 …

via Manuel Moreale May 14, 2025

Generated by openring