How to Set Up a Keyboard Shortcut in Ubuntu to Read Paywall Medium Articles Quickly and Easily

Medium used to be great. Fantastic material on all sorts of topics, presented in a nice clear format.

And then they needed to improve revenue, and suddenly when I clicked on a link to read an interesting-looking article, I found myself faced with a message saying, “You read a lot. We like that.” and asking for five dollars a month.

But it turns out that if you open the same link in an incognito Chrome window you can still read the article. However, I found myself getting tired of having to select the article URL in the address bar, copy it, open a new incognito window, paste the address in, and press Enter. Who wants to waste ten seconds of their life like that? If you read six articles a day, that’s a minute that you’ll never be able to recover, which sums up to six hours a year!

If you use Ubuntu Linux 19.04, you can use the following instructions to bind a command to a keyboard shortcut that does the work for you. If you use an earlier version of Ubuntu finding the settings is slightly different, but the rest of the instructions still work.

1. Click on the little down arrow at the top right, next to the turn off icon.
2. Click on the cog in the menu that drops down. That calls up the settings window.
3. In the settings window click on Devices > Keyboard.
4. Scroll down the right pane and click on the + symbol. This allows you to define a new keyboard shortcut.
5. Enter a name in the first text field, the Name field, for example, “Open Incognito”.
6. Copy and paste the bash command in the grey box below into the Command text field.
7. Click on “Set Shortcut” and choose your key combination. I use Ctrl+Shift+M.
8. Close all the windows.

bash -c "sleep 0.5; xdotool keydown alt key d; sleep 0.2; xdotool keyup alt keydown ctrl key c; sleep 0.2; xdotool keydown shift key n; sleep 0.2; xdotool keyup shift keyup ctrl keydown alt key d; sleep 0.2; xdotool keyup alt keydown ctrl key v; sleep 0.2; xdotool keyup ctrl key KP_Enter"

Now when you’re faced with a Medium paywall message, all you have to do is hit your keyboard shortcut combination, and the article will be available to read in 1.5 seconds.

I wonder how long it will take Medium to remove this article? I can’t find anything in the Medium Rules or Guidelines that this contravenes, so it will be interesting to find out what happens.