oxidiris

A Rust TUI that leverages RSVP to stream docs to your focus point — zero eye movement required.

┌ BACKLOG.md ──────────────────────────┐┌ Text  ·  [Tab] to scroll ────────────┐
│                                      ││## How to Use This Document           │
│                                      ││                                      │
│                                      ││### Task Pick Rules                   │
│                                      ││                                      │
│                                      ││1. Only pick tasks where all          │
│                                      ││`Depends` are in the Done state. Do   │
│                                      ││not do tasks ahead of their           │
│                   ▼                  ││dependencies without permission.      │
│                  ahead               ││2. Tasks labeled BLOCKED-BY-HUMAN     │
│                   ▲                  ││require human decisions (see [Section │
│                                      ││D](#d-decisions-requiring-human-input)│
│                                      ││) — do not decide independently.      │
│                                      ││3. Tasks labeled Parallel-safe can be │
│                                      ││worked on concurrently with other     │
│                                      ││tasks in the same phase without file  │
│                                      ││conflicts.                            │
│                                      ││4. Update task status in the overview │
│                                      ││table when starting (`In progress`)   │
└──────────────────────────────────────┘└──────────────────────────────────────┘
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│speed: 400 WPM (eff. 297)                                   word: 83/6047 (1%)│
│[Space] play   [K / Up] speed   [H / Left] seek   [?] help   [q] quit  ░░░░░░░│
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The highlighted character is the Optimal Recognition Point, and it is drawn at the same terminal column for every word in the document. That is the whole idea: your eye fixates once and the text moves instead.

The panel on the right is the other half of the idea. RSVP takes the page away, and with it your sense of where you are; the panel puts it back, scrolling itself and highlighting the word the reader frame is showing. It appears whenever the window is at least 80 columns wide.

Status

v0.2.0 — reads .md and .txt, with the split view, outline sidebar and Review Mode. See CHANGELOG.md for what this release contains and BACKLOG.md for what comes next.

What it is not

RSVP removes regressions, the small backward eye movements that make up 10-15% of natural reading and are how the brain repairs a misparse. Removing them buys speed and costs comprehension, especially on dense material.

So Oxidiris is a skim and triage tool: work out whether a paper is worth your afternoon, get through a changelog, re-read something you already know. It is not a replacement for reading a hard paper carefully, and it does not advertise a WPM number as an achievement.

Install

Prebuilt binary

No Rust toolchain required. Every release carries a binary for the platforms below; the Linux builds are statically linked against musl, so they run on any distribution regardless of its glibc version. Each block is complete — paste it, and you have oxidiris on your PATH.

Linux, x86_64

curl -fsSL https://github.com/AlexanderSlokov/oxidiris/releases/latest/download/oxidiris-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz | tar -xz
sudo install -m755 oxidiris-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/oxidiris /usr/local/bin/oxidiris
rm -rf oxidiris-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Linux, aarch64

curl -fsSL https://github.com/AlexanderSlokov/oxidiris/releases/latest/download/oxidiris-aarch64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz | tar -xz
sudo install -m755 oxidiris-aarch64-unknown-linux-musl/oxidiris /usr/local/bin/oxidiris
rm -rf oxidiris-aarch64-unknown-linux-musl

macOS, Apple Silicon

curl -fsSL https://github.com/AlexanderSlokov/oxidiris/releases/latest/download/oxidiris-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz | tar -xz
sudo install -m755 oxidiris-aarch64-apple-darwin/oxidiris /usr/local/bin/oxidiris
rm -rf oxidiris-aarch64-apple-darwin

macOS, Intel

curl -fsSL https://github.com/AlexanderSlokov/oxidiris/releases/latest/download/oxidiris-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz | tar -xz
sudo install -m755 oxidiris-x86_64-apple-darwin/oxidiris /usr/local/bin/oxidiris
rm -rf oxidiris-x86_64-apple-darwin

The macOS binaries are unsigned. Downloading with curl as above is fine, because Gatekeeper only quarantines what a browser or Finder wrote. If you fetched the archive in a browser instead, clear the flag once: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /usr/local/bin/oxidiris.

Windows, x86_64 (PowerShell)

$dst = "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\oxidiris"
Invoke-WebRequest https://github.com/AlexanderSlokov/oxidiris/releases/latest/download/oxidiris-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip -OutFile oxidiris.zip
Expand-Archive oxidiris.zip -DestinationPath $dst -Force
Move-Item "$dst\oxidiris-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc\oxidiris.exe" $dst -Force
Remove-Item oxidiris.zip, "$dst\oxidiris-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc" -Recurse
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "$([Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable('Path','User'));$dst", "User")

Open a new terminal afterward so the PATH change takes effect.

Check it worked, on any platform:

oxidiris --version

A SHA256SUMS file is attached to every release if you want to verify the download.

From source

Requires Rust 1.88 or newer.

cargo install --git https://github.com/AlexanderSlokov/oxidiris oxidiris --locked

From a clone of this repository:

cargo install --path crates/oxidiris --locked

A Homebrew tap and a crates.io publish are tracked as OXD-077 in BACKLOG.md.

Use

oxidiris README.md                  # read at the default 300 WPM
oxidiris paper.md -w 450            # start faster
oxidiris paper.md -m focus          # hide the text panel, reader frame only
oxidiris notes.txt --pacing linear  # even timing, no punctuation pauses
oxidiris BACKLOG.md --dump          # clean plain text on stdout
oxidiris BACKLOG.md | less          # piping produces text, not a broken TUI

Keys

The keymap is modal: Tab moves focus to the text panel and o to the outline, and while a panel has focus J/K scroll it instead of changing speed. Esc always returns to reading; only q leaves the program. ? lists the keys that work where you currently are.

While reading:

Key	Action
Space	Play / pause
K ↑ / J ↓	Faster / slower (25 WPM)
+ / -	Faster / slower (5 WPM)
H ← / L →	Back / forward 5 words
[ / ]	Previous / next paragraph
g / G	Start / end
R	Restart
Tab	Focus the text panel
o	Outline sidebar
v	Review the last paragraph
?	Key reference
q	Quit

In the text panel or the outline:

Key	Action
K ↑ / J ↓	Scroll / move the selection
Enter	Jump to the selected heading
Tab / Esc	Back to reading

Review Mode (v) pauses and shows the paragraph you just read, verbatim, markup included. RSVP works by removing the backward glance that repairs a misparse; this is that glance, on purpose. Esc closes it and picks up exactly where you were.

Accessibility

Oxidiris is assistive technology, so these are requirements rather than nice-to-haves:

• The anchor never relies on color alone. It is bold, underlined, and framed by ▼ ▲, so it stays identifiable for color-blind readers and on monochrome terminals (WCAG SC 1.4.1).
• The default speed is 300 WPM, not a marketing number. Rapidly changing text is a photosensitivity risk, and the reader warns once past 700 WPM (WCAG SC 2.3.1).
• NO_COLOR is honored, and color degrades from truecolor through 256 to 16 to none.
• Everything is keyboard-driven. There is no mouse-only action.
• The panel highlight is reversed video, not a colour. Like the anchor, it survives a monochrome terminal; a snapshot test asserts that no colour at all is emitted under NO_COLOR.
• --dump is the screen-reader route. A self-rewriting frame and a screen reader cannot cooperate, so there is a plain-text path out.

Privacy

Oxidiris reads your documents and sends nothing anywhere. No telemetry, no network access. Nothing is written outside the file you opened.

Development

make            # list targets
make check      # fmt, clippy, tests, wasm constraint — the gate CI runs
make frame      # print one rendered frame without opening a terminal session
make demo       # read this project's own backlog

The workspace is two crates:

• oxidiris-core — the engine: Unicode segmentation, ORP, pacing, parsers, playback state. It has no terminal dependency and builds for wasm32-unknown-unknown; CI enforces this so the engine stays reusable for the web build and editor plugins.
• oxidiris — the terminal application.

Design notes live in docs/informations/proposals.md; decisions that departed from it are recorded in docs/decisions/ and back-annotated into the spec.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. See DEC-01 for an open question about dual-licensing the engine crate.