Why I built a manga reader for the terminal
I live in the terminal, so context-switching to a browser to read manga felt wrong. manga-tui is a Bubbletea-based reader: search, track your library, cache chapters, read offline.
Stack
- Bubbletea + Lipgloss for the TUI
- SQLite for library + progress
- Image rendering via sixel/kitty graphics with ASCII fallback
Hard parts
- Image protocols differ per terminal — detect and degrade gracefully.
- Caching aggressively so re-reads are instant.
- Keybindings that don’t fight vim muscle memory.