Lucid – Reader Mode & Focus Reading

Strip the clutter from any article. Control font, size and width, and turn on focus reading. Fast, private, works offline.

Lucid strips the clutter from any article and gives you a reading surface you actually control. Press Alt+R or click the toolbar icon and the page is replaced by just the headline, byline and body text — no nav bars, no sidebars, no popovers, no cookie banners, no related-links grids. Press it again and the page comes back exactly where you left it, scroll position and all. WHAT YOU CAN CONTROL • Four themes — light, sepia, grey and a real dark mode, not an inverted light one • Typeface, text size, column width and line spacing, adjustable from inside the reader while you read • Focus reading — emphasises the leading letters of each word to help your eye pull through the line, with adjustable strength • An optional line guide that follows your pointer • A reading-progress bar • A list of sites the reader opens on automatically PRIVATE BY DESIGN Lucid runs entirely on your machine. There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics, no telemetry, and no network requests of any kind. It works offline. Your preferences are stored in your own browser and never leave it. It also asks for as little as possible. There are no content scripts, so nothing runs on any page until you press the shortcut or click the icon — which is why Chrome does not warn you about reading your data on all websites when you install it. Site-specific access is requested one site at a time, only when you add one to the auto-open list, and revoked the moment you remove it. DETAILS THAT MATTER The reader lives in a shadow root, so site CSS cannot leak in and the reading view looks identical everywhere. Everything pulled from the page passes an attribute allowlist, so inline handlers and javascript: URLs are dropped. Code blocks are left untouched by focus reading. Printing from the reader gives you a clean page with no controls. Works on news sites, blogs, Substack, Medium, Wikipedia and documentation. If a page isn't an article, Lucid tells you instead of showing you an empty reader.