Sweat is an open-source program that escorts you through the pain of exercise — in particular, the effective but unpleasant intensity of the seven-minute workout — by reading aloud some mildly interesting novelties to distract you from your struggle. This includes cultural trivia, headline news, weather reports, and sad old jokes.

A video demonstration (and turn on your speaker, please) of Sweat touring through a randomly chosen link-chain of Wikipedia articles, and ending with a recitation of fortune output:

This blog post has further demonstrations and more information about Sweat besides.

Getting Sweat

Pre-compiled binaries

The most recent version of Sweat is v202101030, compiled Sun Jan 3 16:33:18 2021. See a list of recent changes to Sweat here.

After downloading, you'll probably need to chmod +x the resulting file to make it executable. (I did mention this was a command-line program, right?)

• Sweat for Mac (Darwin) (Note that the file may arrive as sweat.dms, if downloaded with Safari. Rename it at your leisure.)
• Sweat for Linux (32-bit)
• Sweat for Linux (64-bit)

Source code

• Sweat on GitHub
• Sweat on CPAN

Using Sweat

Run sweat --help to see a quick guide of options.

Read the most current documentation for Sweat on its MetaCPAN page.

Quick start: Mac

Just run it from the command line, with no arguments! It should launch right into a full workout, with Wikipedia articles.

Quick start: Linux

You’ll need a text-to-speech program on your system, one that accepts whatever’s fed to it as a command-line argument as input. espeak is one choice that’s available through most package managers.