readtime

README

readtime

readtime is an trivially simple command line utility to give you an estimate of how long it will take you to read a text-based document. 📄👀

Usage

I often use wc to give me an idea of how large a document is before reading it, but the numbers don't really mean that much to me intuitively. This gives me a fuzzy reading estimate based on a standard 200 words-per-minute, so I know what I'm getting into beforehand.

$ readtime README.md
2 min read

Or, you could maybe use this to figure out how much of a windbag you are and get Medium style estimates for all your Jekyll blog posts:

$ readtime $BLOG/_posts/*.markdown | sort -nr | head -n5
 17 min read	_posts/2003-02-01-a-conversation-with-paul-bausch.markdown
 10 min read	_posts/2012-11-09-the-year-in-side-projects.markdown
  6 min read	_posts/2014-10-02-rubygems-bundler-they-took-our-jobs.markdown
  5 min read	_posts/2011-03-14-on-leaving-flickr.markdown
  5 min read	_posts/2009-07-08-palm-pre-mojo-sdk-experiments.markdown

You can override the default WPM (words-per-minute) calculation with the -r flag. For example, if you are a really fast reader, and want to practice your reading skills on the dictionary:

$ readtime -r 450 /usr/share/dict/words
525 min read

If no filenames are provided readtime will act like a standard Unix tool and attempt to process STDIN in a way that is pipeline aware.

$ lynx --dump https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html | readtime
26 min read

Installation

For now this is just available as source code, and requires Go to compile.

go get github.com/mroth/readtime

If there is actually demand, I will make precompiled binaries available, and package for homebrew, etc.