$100 to upgrade Fresh IDE for ePub TUI reading

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Article news.ycombinator.com

$100 to upgrade Fresh IDE for ePub TUI reading

I donate to open source, and I'm loving the new Fresh IDE TUI for teaching students. I found it after trying astronvim, helix, zed, micro, etc.

I'm offering $100 as an incentive for anyone on HN who can add epub reader capabilities to Fresh using Rust.

https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh/issues/2087

Spec: in the left-side file explorer, I select file `foo.epub`, then the right-side file viewer shows me the epub content as human-readable text not bytes.

Scope: The goal is to be good enough for a developer to be able to read epub documentation within Fresh in the TUI, without needing to call pandoc or launch a separate app or helper or plugin. Fresh runs locally on the developer's laptop, and the ePub is on a remote server and for security reasons cannot be downloaded to the local laptop.

Implementation: I can suggest trying the Rust crate `epub` and `bookokrat` because these work well for me in other projects. The implementation can't use JavaScript or TypeScript because of compliance aspects beyond me.

As an aside, I'm not affiliated with Fresh in any way, other than as a happy user and open source sponsor.

Discussion 5 comments · 4 points · jph · 2026-05-24
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