Lately I’ve been having an itch to read some manga after taking a break from the medium for a few years. I really dislike smartphones, for obvious reasons, but reading manga using Tachiyomi, and later Kotatsu, on an android phone was my preferred way of doing it for a long time. I just can’t do it anymore. Maybe I’m getting old, but the small screen won’t cut it.
I’ll get to surfing the web in just a moment, bear with me.
MComix is another manga/comic reader that I’ve used previously on Linux and also now on FreeBSD. It’s great for reading on the desktop but it has no built-in scraper for online sources, unlike the apps on android.
Mangadex is my preferred source for manga so the next logical step was to use the reader on their website. But I was annoyed that I had to be using a browser. Why’s everything gotta be a webapp? If I’m in the mood for reading manga I want to just read manga. If I’m in a browser, well, then I’m in a browser. The portals to a sea of parallel worlds are open and the sirens are calling to me. Somebody tie me to the mast!
Phew. Saved by Firefox Kiosk mode. If you start Firefox with --kiosk it
will prevent you from opening multiple tabs and, among some other minor
things, it disables the toolbar and search bar. You’re limited to only
viewing the contents of the page. Wonderful! Time to abuse the hell out of
this. But…
Emphasis on the page. You can only open a single page from the command
line with firefox --kiosk foobar.com. No worries!
Enter Tridactyl. An addon that adds vim-like keybinds to Firefox, which
not only makes navigating a lot comfier, but you can also press o or s
to open Tridactyl’s url/search bar, which also gives access to your
bookmarks, circumventing the problem above.
But, if I have access to these things, how is the problem of distraction solved? Simple. You can’t access those things with the mouse. When you’re holding a mouse you’re constantly hovering over something. Every movement is vague and incomplete. It becomes easy to drift. That’s precisely what the designers of the most noxious sites rely on: a way of interfacing with their service that is most prone to manipulation. Mice and touchscreens. If you’re forced to use only the keyboard every keypress is deliberate and has one specific function. Also no tabs means no multitasking, and no multitasking means more focusing on the task at hand.
Obviously having a dozen tabs open at once is sometimes useful, like when you’re doing preliminary research on something and want to skim through a pool of information, gathering data and then narrowing it down; to see if it leads to better resources; or maybe to some other topic, or software project, you didn’t know existed, to be looked into later. But for using individual webapps or looking at websites this is the ultimate distraction free browsing experience, without using minimalist browsers like suckless' surf browser. You can enjoy all the benefits of having an adblocker while surfing the bloated web with a bloated browser.
Addendum
Almost immediately after writing this I stopped using the Mangadex webapp reader and just started scraping the site with mangadex-downloader. I also ditched MComix in favour of plain MuPDF. As simple as it gets. Everything said about kiosk mode still applies.
Addendum ii
On a similar note of keeping things simple, I’m eagerly waiting to start exploring Geminispace after I clear up my to-do list a little bit.
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