Rapid Reader
Highlight text anywhere with the extension, share to this app on your phone, or press + to paste. Select an item to start reading.
Sign in to get your own private reading queue:
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Rapid Reader
Highlight text anywhere with the extension, share to this app on your phone, or press + to paste. Select an item to start reading.
Sign in to get your own private reading queue:
Eases you in from 200 WPM up to your target.
Optional comfort aids for long reads — keeping your gaze on one spot is the point.
Drag-free, lean editor. Rename a column, set which sources feed it, or remove it. Sources not listed anywhere fall into the first column.
Pull your Claude Code & Codex sessions and your highlights into Rapid Reader. For your security a web page can't run anything on your machine — so download the one-click script (recommended) or paste the command into a terminal once. It targets with your own access token.
Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) flashes one word at a time at a fixed spot, so your eyes never move. It was pioneered by MIT psychologist Mary C. Potter, whose experiments showed the brain grasps meaning astonishingly fast. Readers could spot a named target picture in a stream shown as briefly as 13 milliseconds each (Potter et al., 2014).
Ordinary reading spends a real chunk of its time not on words but on moving your eyes (the jumps, called saccades, plus the line-return sweeps between fixations) and on silently sounding words out. RSVP removes the eye movement entirely and nudges you past sub-vocalizing. For reference, typical adult silent reading is about 238 wpm for non-fiction and 260 wpm for fiction, with most people between 175 and 300 (Brysbaert, 2019, a meta-analysis of 190 studies).
Speed reading isn't magic. The most thorough review of the science (Rayner, Schotter, Masson, Potter & Treiman, 2016) found that pushing speed too high costs comprehension, partly because RSVP removes regressions (re-reading), which the brain uses to repair misunderstandings. So read at a comfortable pace for things that matter, and faster when you just want the gist.
| Reading style | Typical speed | Comprehension |
|---|---|---|
| Careful silent reading | 175 to 300 wpm | High |
| Skimming | roughly 400 to 700 wpm | Gist only; details drop |
| RSVP (this app) | you choose | High at moderate speeds, falls as you push |
Sources: Brysbaert 2019; Rayner et al. 2016.
Because the word stays put, RSVP eliminates the constant eye movement of normal reading, which can reduce eye fatigue and feels more comfortable, particularly on small screens. It also helps people whose eyes can't sweep a page easily. For older readers and those with central-vision loss (e.g. age-related macular degeneration), one fixed reading point is a genuine aid: a training study of observers averaging about 74 years old improved their RSVP reading speed by roughly 53% (Yu et al., central-vision-loss study; overview: Wikipedia, RSVP).
Tip: start in Build mode (it eases you up from 200 WPM), slow down for hard passages, and don't chase the highest number. Comprehension is the point.
Rapid Reader uses Google's Gemini to write sharp little titles for everything you capture. Drop in your own free Gemini API key so you're reading on your own quota — about thirty seconds.
No rush — this is optional. You can add or change your key anytime in ⚙ Settings.
Look at something about 20 feet away for a moment — it relaxes the focusing muscles a screen keeps tense, and gives you a chance to blink.
20s