Speedreading with Emacs and Spray, a Spritz implementation

I have experimented with speedreading on and of for many years.

This time I got interested in a new speed read method called Spritz. There are many demonstrations of this system on the web if you are interested to see it in action.

There are other speed read systems for Emacs, and now there is also Spray, a Spritz implementation for Emacs.

Essentially the algorithm shows you a word at a time from the text you want to speedread. The Spritz algorithm tries to enhance the traditional method of just blinking the words before you in a set tempo the following way.

• The current word is always centered
• The first word in a sentence has a slightly longer screen time
• The center letter of the word is red, the other letters are black
• Theres a further visual guide for the center of the word

I tried it with a Gnus article, and I got quickly up to speed with how the algorithm works. I got 400 words per minute, according to the variable spray-wpm. I timed it myself also to verify the speed.

A reading speed of 400 wpm is pretty neat.