book

Type your way through an arbitrary book. Book mode is open-ended — there's no time limit and no FSRS state changes — and is designed for applying the chords you've already learned to real long-form prose.

uv run chordgen book ~/books/dracula.txt
uv run chordgen book ~/books/sherlock.epub

Supported formats:

• .txt (and .md, treated as plain text).
• .epub — parsed with ebooklib.

What the screen shows

• Top bar: book title, current paragraph index, and a sliding-window WPM (default last 30 seconds — see book.wpm_window_seconds).
• Middle: a window of the book centred on the word you're typing. Words you have already mastered (FSRS Review state) are highlighted in yellow — including the word you're currently typing — so you can see where to apply your learned chords; everything else is rendered plain.
• Below the text: chords for the current word are revealed only when you've mistyped a learned word, rendered as <chord><slot> (e.g. au for the base, au1 for alt1) directly beneath the word in the text block — same reveal-on-stumble UX as drill mode.
• Bottom: your keyboard layout. When you mistype a learned word the chord keys are highlighted on the keyboard, and an alt1 alt2 alt3 indicator below the keyboard highlights the active alt slot (if any).

Alt chords

Alt-slot inflections from chords.csv (alt1 / alt2 / alt3) inherit their base row's mastery, so an alt1 form like cars is highlighted in the prose alongside its graduated base car. When you mistype an alt form, the chord shown beneath the word is suffixed with the slot digit (e.g. ca1 for an alt1) and the alt indicator below the keyboard highlights the firmware modifier you need to combine with the base chord.

Resume

Your cursor is automatically saved to ~/.config/chordgen/books.json keyed by the SHA-1 of the book file's contents. Re-running chordgen book <path> picks up where you left off — even if the file has been moved or renamed since you last typed. Pass --restart to forget the saved cursor and start from the beginning:

uv run chordgen book sherlock.epub --restart

Navigation

Books often have a lot of front-matter (table of contents, copyright, etc.). Skip past it with the keyboard:

Keys	Action
← / →	Move one word back / forward
↑ / ↓	Move one line back / forward
PgUp / PgDn	Move half a screen-page of words back / forward
Esc / Ctrl+C	Save and quit

The cursor always lands on a typeable word — punctuation-only and whitespace tokens are stepped over automatically.

Typeable text

Book text is normalised on load so users on a plain QWERTY layout aren't blocked by untypeable glyphs. Smart quotes (“ ” ‘ ’), em/en dashes (— –), ligatures (fi fl), accented Latin (à é ñ ç æ œ ß …) and miscellaneous symbols (™ … • © ® ° × ÷) are folded to their ASCII equivalents.

Configuration

Book mode reads a small block of config.yaml:

book:
  wpm_window_seconds: 30      # Sliding window for the running WPM
  max_width: 80               # Max width (chars) of the rendered text block
  always_show_chords: false   # Render chords beneath every learned word, not just on a stumble

The number of lines shown grows automatically to fill the available terminal height — the cursor's line is kept centred, with as many previous and following lines above and below as fit on screen. PgUp/PgDn jump by half the visible page.