alt Hacker News> I'm sure there's a proposal for this somewhere, but I've always wondered if it wouldn't be most viable to just have a separate "reader mode" that replaces all the TUI elements with some sort of templated descriptive string of text, something like "Page one. Foo entry. ' bar'"
We have a term for that, it's called a CLI. For example, ed and ex are the historical CLI counterparts to vi.
I suppose that would just be an interactive CLI. Usually I think of them as one-and-done invocations like sed. It's definitely not an ideal mode as evidenced by the current popularity of vim over ed, but it's better than a program being unusable.