Plain

Want to read a web article without all the cruft? plain grabs the text you care about and leave out the rest.

Installation

You'll need to have Go installed on your machine. The getting started guide is a good walkthrough of how to do this.

To install the plain binary, run this command:

go install github.com/qsymmachus/plain

Usage

The plain command accepts a -url flag. It will download the page at that address, extract the article's text, and print it out as plaintext. Here's an example:

plain -url https://henrikwarne.com/2020/03/22/secure-by-design/

This just prints the article text to standard output. Optionally, you may output the text to a file using the -file flag:

plain -url https://henrikwarne.com/2020/03/22/secure-by-design/ -file secure-by-design.txt

A few caveats: the program is not very clever. Currently it just extracts the text from all paragraph and header tags. This means that other text that might be relevant will be skipped, and it can't handle non-HTML content at all. I'll keep working on it, but as-is, it works well for most text articles you'll encounter.