epuppy - terminal epub reader

This is a little TUI epub ebook reader. This is a work in progress and may not work for all EPUB files yet. It uses a modified version of the epub module, which seems to be unmaintained but the best I could find to parse EPUBs. Find it in the pkg/epub/ directory.

The idea behind this tool is to be able to just take a look into some epub file without the need to leave the shell. And it had to be fast enough to just peak into an ebook. However, it is possible to actually read epub ebooks with epuppy but I'd encourage you to buy a hardware ebook reader with an e-ink display. It's better for your eyes in the long run.

Screenshots

• Viewing an ebook in dark mode

• Viewing an ebook in light mode

• You can interactively adjust text width

• Showing the help

Usage

To read an ebook, just give a filename as argument to epuppy.

Add the option -s to store and use a previously stored reading progress.

Sometimes you may be unhappy with the colors. Depending on your terminal style you can enable dark mode with -D, light mode is the default. You can also configure custom colors in a config file in $HOME/.config/epuppy/confit.toml:

# color setting for dark mode
colordark = {
  body = "#ffffff",
  title = "#7cfc00",
  chapter = "#ffff00"
}

# color setting for light mode
colorlight = {
  body = "#000000",
  title = "#8470ff",
  chapter = "#00008b"
}

# always use dark mode
dark = true

There are also cases where your current terminal just doesn't have the capabilites for this stuff. I stumbled upon such a case during an SSH session from my Android phone to a FreeBSD server. For this you can either just disable colors with -N or by setting the environment variable $NO_COLOR to 1. Or you can just dump the text of the ebook and pipe it to some pager, e.g.:

epuppy -t someebook.epub | less

There are also a couple of debug options etc, all options:

Usage epuppy [options] <epub file>

Options:
-D --dark                enable dark mode
-s --store-progress      remember reading position
-n --line-numbers        add line numbers
-c --config <file>       use config <file>
-t --txt                 dump readable content to STDOUT
-x --xml                 dump source xml to STDOUT
-N --no-color            disable colors (or use $NO_COLOR env var)
-d --debug               enable debugging
-h --help                show help message
-v --version             show program version

Installation

The tool does not have any dependencies. Just download the binary for your platform from the releases page and you're good to go.

Installation using a pre-compiled binary

Go to the latest release page and look for your OS and platform. There are two options to install the binary:

Directly download the binary for your platform, e.g. epuppy-linux-amd64-0.0.2, rename it to epuppy (or whatever you like more!) and put it into your bin dir (e.g. $HOME/bin or as root to /usr/local/bin).

Be sure to verify the signature of the binary file. For this also download the matching epuppy-linux-amd64-0.0.2.sha256 file and:

cat epuppy-linux-amd64-0.0.2.sha25 && sha256sum epuppy-linux-amd64-0.0.2

You should see the same SHA256 hash.

You may also download a binary tarball for your platform, e.g. epuppy-linux-amd64-0.0.2.tar.gz, unpack and install it. GNU Make is required for this:

tar xvfz epuppy-linux-amd64-0.0.2.tar.gz
cd epuppy-linux-amd64-0.0.2
sudo make install

Installation from source

Check out the repository and execute go build, then copy the compiled binary to your $PATH.

Or, if you have GNU Make installed, just execute:

make
sudo make install

Report bugs

Please open an issue. Thanks!

License

This work is licensed under the terms of the General Public Licens version 3.

Author

Copyleft (c) 2025 Thomas von Dein