About

It allows reading and downloading manga from MangaDex

demo.mp4

Please Read

As of February 8th, 2025

I wrote this project to learn Bash doing my best to not use chatgpt for anything other than general syntax questions, if you see anything I my might've missed or something to improve the script, feel free to open an issue.

The Keymaps situation is far from perfect. Sometimes depending on the current application state, Ctrl+c doesn't stop all of the processes. See Keymaps Section for more details.

Currently Manga can only be read after being downloaded.

I am working on "Live Reading", I'm just a bit burnt out with this project at the moment. But I'll get on it as soon as possible.

Features

• Downloading All or Selected Chapters of Manga (Note: Some popular titles like One Piece are not available on MangaDex)
• Reading Manga
• Chapters switch automatically, meaning once you arrive at the end of one chapter and go next, the next chapter begins and vice versa.
• Chapters must be downloaded FIRST, before reading. Live reading not yet available
• Save Reading Sessions
• Read standalone .cbz files ex. creader chapter_1.cbz

Keymaps/Navigation

Gum Keymaps

Gum is used to generate the nicer menus in the script

NOTE: Gum has its own keymaps that are used, these are builtin and as far as I know they cannot be changed. They are printed below each menu

One important keymapping in Gum Escape disables the fuzzy search (Chapter Selection Menu(Reader & Download), Manga Selection Menu(Reader) ) and '/' enables it again. This is useful if you are like me and used to vim keys for navigation. Otherwise your keystrokes register in the fuzzy finder.

Example

In the Manga Chapter selection menu when selecting what to download:

ctrl+a - select all 
tab - select specifc entries - 
      you must first use escape to temporarily disable the fuzzy searching before using tab,
      fuzzy search can be used again after pressing '/' 

Gum Bindings are already show in each menu, below you will see some of my own binding, my bindings cannot be used in conjuction with gum's bindings or vice versa. I know this maybe confusing but this is the best I could do at the moment, until my rewrite in go (TBD).

Only in some states of the app does Ctrl+C works correctl, I think it has to do with how I'm using gum, but I'm not sure. As a result I've added in options to gum menus for Exiting and Going Back.

Keymaps (not gum)

While Reading Manga

q/Ctrl+c - Quit/Exit 
j/down   - next page 
k/up     - previous page 
h/left   - previous chapter 
l/right  - next chapter
r        - load saved sessions menu
s        - save current reading session
m        - go back to main menu
b        - go back to chapter selection for current manga

Manga Info Preview Page

This is shown when selecting manga to download

q/Ctrl+c - Quit/Exit
b        - back to manga selection menu 
enter    - selects the manga 
any key  - returns to main menu

When passing a .cbz file as an argument

j/down   - next page 
k/up     - previous page 
q/ctrl+c - Quit/Exit
m        - Main Menu

Session Management

creader -cs Clears all saved sessions

I haven't implemented more features for managing sessions yet, but if you want to delete a specific session, you can go to ~/.config/creader/sessions/ and delete the corresponding .txt file.

Installation

Set Environment Variable

• This is the location of where the downloaded manga will be stored and where the reader will look to read from.
• Make sure the directory exists
• Feel free to choose a destination that suits you, below is my personal option

export MANGA_DL_DIR="$HOME/Downloads/Manga/"

Dependencies

You will need a terminal with image support. The terminal in the demo is WezTerm, I have also tried this successfully on Kitty and Ghostty

chafa gum awk cut sed file find grep tput tr jq sort

There are two ways to install, via the script and manually

Script

Be sure to read the install script before running it!

You will be prompted for sudo access for the last command in the script, to copy the script to your PATH

wget "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Hiro427/creader/refs/heads/main/install.sh" 
chmod +x install.sh 
./install.sh

Manual

You can read through the install script yourself and copy the commands, or follow below.

cd ~/.config && mkdir creader #make creader directory in .config directory

#make directories in ~/.config/creader/, be sure to check spelling, these directories are coded in the main script
mkdir active/
mkdir sessions/
mkdir tmp/ 

#clone repo 
cd && git clone https://github.com/Hiro427/creader.git
cd creader/


#Make the script an executable 
chmod +x creader.sh

#Copy script to PATH
sudo cp ./creader.sh /usr/local/bin/creader

#Move the ASCII Header to the config directory 
cp header.txt ~/.config/creader/