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yomi

Quick start

From an empty terminal to clean Markdown: one page, a whole site as a folder, and a single combined file.

This walks the core loop: read one page, save it to a file, read a whole site into a folder, collapse a site into one file, and preview a folder in the browser.

1. Read one page

yomi read paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

yomi fetches the page, renders it only if it looks JavaScript-gated, extracts the article, and prints Markdown to stdout. The document opens with a front-matter block:

---
title: How to Do Great Work
url: https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
site: Paul Graham
byline: Paul Graham
published: 2023-07-01
fetched: 2026-06-17T09:30:00Z
lang: en
word_count: 13500
reading_time: 54 min
---

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot
of different fields, what would the intersection look like? ...

2. Save it to a file

yomi read paulgraham.com/greatwork.html -o greatwork.md

-o writes the Markdown to a file instead of stdout. Open greatwork.md in any editor and you have the essay, no nav, no footer, no cookie banner.

3. Read a whole site into a folder

yomi site paulgraham.com -o pg/

yomi crawls the site in scope, writes one .md file per page mirroring the URL paths, and adds a SUMMARY.md table of contents. Downloaded images, if you ask for them, share a media/ folder.

pg/
├── SUMMARY.md            # table of contents, one row per page
├── index.md              # the home page (/)
├── greatwork.md          # /greatwork.html
├── articles.md           # /articles.html
└── media/                # shared images (with --images download)

SUMMARY.md is a plain Markdown list linking the pages by title, so the folder reads like a small book.

4. Collapse a site into one file

yomi site paulgraham.com --single -o paulgraham.md

--single (or -s) assembles the whole crawl into one Markdown document: a table of contents at the top, then every page as its own section with an anchor, with each page's headings demoted so the file keeps a single clean outline. One file you can read top to bottom.

5. Preview a folder

yomi serve pg/
# open http://127.0.0.1:8800

yomi serve runs a local static file server over a folder of Markdown so you can click through it in a browser.

Where to go next

  • The guides cover reading a page, crawling a site, the single vs folder choice, and images in depth.
  • The CLI reference lists every command and flag.
2 min read