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Repy

Terminal ePub reader with built-in TTS and dictionary lookup

Details

External ID
47021114
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Repy
Website domain
github.com
Launched
Feb. 15, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
5
Upvotes percentile
0.10512129380053908
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

I built repy because I wanted to read EPUBs over SSH and in tmux without leaving the terminal. It started as a Rust reimplementation of epy (a Python CLI ebook reader), but has grown well beyond that.Features: vim-style navigation (hjkl, /, n/N, Ctrl+o/Ctrl+i jump history), bookmarks, table of contents, visual mode with yank-to-clipboard, regex search across chapters, and per-book width/position persistence via SQLite.Two features I'm particularly happy with:- Text-to-speech: Press ! and it reads the book aloud, sentence by sentence (~300-400 chars per chunk), with the current passage underlined. Uses edge-playback (Microsoft Edge TTS) by default, configurable to espeak, say, or any custom command. Smart scrolling keeps the spoken text visible without jumping around unnecessarily. - Dictionary lookup: Select a word in visual mode and press d for dictionary (auto-detects wkdict/sdcv/dict) or p for Wikipedia summary. Configurable to any custom command.Full disclosure: this project is almost entirely AI-built. I don't know Rust — I described what I wanted and Claude Code wrote the implementation. The fact that a non-Rust-programmer can build and iterate on a 5000+ line Rust TUI application through conversation is, honestly, kind of amazing. Every feature, bug fix, and refactor in this project went through that workflow.

Enrichment

Theme
git and repository workflow tools
Vertical
Media & entertainment
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
terminal epub reader with text-to-speech and dictionary
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes Terminal TUI applications with text parsing, standard dictionary lookup APIs, and local TTS integration are well-understood domains that AI coding assistants excel at implementing.

Discussion

No comments on this launch.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 88 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #86 of 89 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 102 days after the earliest competitor.

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