readability-cli/README.md

reader-view-cli

Firefox Reader View in your terminal!

reader-view-cli takes any HTML page and strips out unnecessary bloat by using Mozilla's Readability library. As a result, you get a web page which contains only the core content and nothing more. The resulting HTML is suitable for terminal browsers, text readers, and other uses.

Here is a before-and-after comparison, using an article from The Guardian as a test subject.

Standard view in W3M

So much useless stuff that the main article does not even fit on the screen!

reader-view-cli + W3M

Ah, much better.

Usage

readable [SOURCE] [options]

readable [options] -- [SOURCE]

where SOURCE is a file, an http(s) URL, or '-' for standard input

See readable --help for more information.

Examples

Read HTML from a file and output the result to the console:

readable index.html

Fetch a web page and read it in W3M:

readable https://example.com/page | w3m -T text/html

Download a web page using cURL, get the title, the content, and an excerpt in plain text:

curl https://example.com/page | readable --url=https://example.com/page -p title,excerpt,text-content

It's a good idea to supply the --url parameter when piping input, otherwise readable won't know the document's URL, and things like relative links won't work.