9 ms·

Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

251 points by kick 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kick 6y ago
For anyone curious, because Gemini is relatively new and kind of has flown under the radar: ### 1.1 What is Gemini? Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design strives to maximise its "power to weight ratio", while keeping its weight within "acceptable" limits. Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious. You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right back to its essence" or as "Gopher, souped up and modernised a little", depending upon your perspective. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt Gopher and finger should be obvious, but just in case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol
- apatters 6y ago
  I was delighted when I saw that Gemini is maintained by someone on SDF (named Solderpunk, never heard of him before). This seems as good a time as any to plug https://sdf.org https://sdf.org, a great little community which has the feel of a 90s BBS that never went offline.
  - kick 6y ago
    The site isn't at www.sdf.org for the record, it's just at sdf.org. There's a big difference in what you'll find!
    - apatters 6y ago
      Don't know how I missed that, I've updated my link!
    - treve 6y ago
      I'm getting redirected from www.sdf.org to sdf.org, but now I'm curious.
      - kick 6y ago
        Try this, which should bring you to MetaArray stuff: https://www.sdf.org/ https://www.sdf.org/ (It's what was originally linked to.)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - visiblink 6y ago
    Speaking of great little BBS-like communities, Solderpunk is actually the admin of zaibatsu.circumlunar.space.
  - piffey 6y ago
    Forever grateful for SDF. Graduated into the last depression, was super broke, my computer died, and I could barely get hours between two restaurant jobs just to make rent. For about 3 years used SDF from the library to keep my dev spaces up, learned to work entirely from the terminal. Now I rarely leave one. Should log back in on there. Had all the tools for doing work and for learning bits about computings past.
  - rdrey 6y ago
    Wow, this lead me down quite a rabbit hole. I hadn't heard of SDF, thanks!
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  From an implementor's view I decided to not implement Gemini as it is specified, because I do not like its text/gemini default format. They should either decide for a specified full file format, e.g. CommonMark or HTML5 (with index.html as default routes) or don't try to implement a file format inside a network protocol at all. In my opinion, file structures (and layouts thereof) should have nothing to do with a network protocol. The reason why the web exploded was because HTML was the best technology to allow custom web pages, and more importantly, while in parallel to allow them to interlink. If either of these two aspects are separated, the concept won't work for the discovery and exploration of new content. Remember the sparkling unicorn gifs and construction animations everywhere? That's what the web was about. I do not agree with how JS has exploded over the years, hence the reason for writing my own web browser/scraper/proxy [1] - but I do agree with the "why" HTML5/CSS3 makes sense for themselves while ignoring the scriptable aspects. For me, as someone trying to build a web browser, the text/gemini concept makes it super-hacky and very much prone to future errors to integrate it with the rest of the web. Faking and rendering another file format (based on the runtime environment) should not be its recommendation. A much simpler approach would be e.g. simply using "gemini://" for resources inside an HTML(5) file. Additionally, a killer feature for HTTP/1.1 is the continuous download of files that have been partially downloaded. While I think the practical implementation of 206 ranges is pretty messed up (looking at you, nginx, who cannot count the amount of ranges requested), I do agree with the positive aspects of it. Something like this has to be integrated into a minimal network protocol, otherwise it cannot be adopted in mobile/2G slow areas. [1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth
  - astrobe_ 6y ago
    > The reason why the web exploded was because ... Depends on which big bang you talk about. Gopher lost to HTML because Gopher was TUI-oriented when HTML was GUI-oriented. And Gopher lost a second time when Web 2.0 (JS expansion) occurred. TUI is not so vastly inferior to GUI - at least when it comes to reading and writing and sparse multimedia contents. The Web exploded because GUI appears to be more user-friendly. There are vastly more users that need "friendliness" than users that just need honesty ;-) In my mind, if one wants to suggest an alternative to the Web, one either has to go back to the passive, text-oriented web or one-up the current Web with something even more interactive and even more graphical. In my opinion the only way to achieve successfully the latter is to provide a much easier way to make remote interactive graphical applications, with strong security guarantees of course. I believe that something like Squeak could do that job. It kind of already was done with Croquet/Cobalt. As for the former approach, I would suggest 80 columns monospace text as the standard document format, with the footnote-style convention for links - not some oddity that's midway between text and HTML. So in both case I think one has to be extreme in order to succeed. Either extreme sophistication or extreme simplicity.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  any idea about how to make the font in castor bigger? the default size is impossible for me to read. I tried the usual keyboard shortcuts but doesn't work. Do I have to set some gtk env variables maybe so it uses the correct size font?
  - julienXX 6y ago
    Somebody (you?) asked for this feature this morning. I'll add it to the settings. For now it takes your default GTK3 font so I think you can change it globally somewhere.
    - DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
      thanks for getting back. You're right it was in the config file, my problem was that I had the font name surrounded by quotes and so it wasn't recognized. This works: cat .config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini [Settings] gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=true gtk-font-name = DejaVu Sans Regular 12 ... for some reason ~/.gtkrc-2.0 needs variable values quoted, but gtk-3.0 doesn't.
ddevault 6y ago
The Gemini protocol is cool. I've been thinking about writing an implementation of it, and perhaps eventually a *.sr.ht frontend for it. I think the browsers have a lot of work to do before they're pleasant to use, though.
achillean 6y ago
There are still a few Gopher and Finger services on the Internet. * Gopher: https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A70+gopher https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A70+gopher * Finger: https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=product%3Afingerd https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=product%3Afingerd
- kick 6y ago
  There are a lot of Gopher ones! Reports of the death of Gopher have been (mostly) exaggerated; it's probably got more users now than it did at its peak.
  - battery_cowboy 6y ago
    Doesn't that make this it's peak?
    - kick 6y ago
      If it's got a smaller percentage of on-line users on it, is it really peaking?
      - battery_cowboy 6y ago
        Good point!
- stevekemp 6y ago
  By coincidence I added a trivial finger-server to my golang utility toolbox today: https://github.com/skx/sysbox https://github.com/skx/sysbox Create ~/.plan and clients can query it remotely, just like in the old days.
agumonkey 6y ago
Typically what I like, frugal and light. Nice.
xellisx 6y ago
IIRC, John Carmack used finger for blogging for the longest time.
- petercooper 6y ago
  He did. There are numerous archives of them, and they seem to do well on HN when they're posted every year or two. https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
macintux 6y ago
Recent discussion of Gemini: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424
aninteger 6y ago
I thought this was using Motif based on the screenshots. Man, imagine how much lighter it could be if it was actually using the motif toolkit
- projektfu 6y ago
  I thought so too. Are they running Gtk on mvwm?
  - julienXX 6y ago
    It's GTK on FVWM
badsectoracula 6y ago
I've made my own Gopher client[0] some time ago, but TBH after the novelty of making it, eventually i abandoned it because i couldn't find anything interesting in there. The most interesting stuff were either gateways from the web or blogs which also had a web version. On the other hand it was fun making it with how ridiculously simple the Gopher protocol is. Sadly it seems that "Gemini" requires TLS that kills that simplicity - Gopher can implemented by anyone, TLS... i think it is a bit harder. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/
- RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
  Gemini allows clients to function without TLS, but it limits their access/functionality. I'd be very interested in seeing an attempt at a minimal, portable standalone implementation of TLS suitable for Gemini's needs.
  - kick 6y ago
    BearSSL is pretty tiny, though I haven't looked at it beyond a glance at the homepage after a friend linked it. Is it what you had in mind? https://bearssl.org/ https://bearssl.org/
    - RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
      Could be promising. I'll do some reading. Thanks, kick!
      - kick 6y ago
        Always happy to share what I know!
  - x3blah 6y ago
    Protocol mandates use of nothing less than TLS v1.2 so one could skip/remove all support for lesser versions.
- 6y ago
jansc 6y ago
If you prefer a terminal-based browser, there is also ncgopher at https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher. Despite its name, it also has support for gemini browsing, though it still is work in progress. That said, Castor is great! Disclaimer: I'm the author of ncgopher.
app4soft 6y ago
> written in Rust with GTK. This is overhead: worst lang + worst toolkit + worst platform support. Do not hesitate to use Links2.[0] [0] http://links.twibright.com http://links.twibright.com
- vhakulinen 6y ago
  > worst lang What makes it bad? > worst toolkit Its actually quite decent. > worst platform support How come? GTK works on window, mac, linux (+ BSDs and probably other unix like systems). What else would you be looking for from this kind of software? The platform support is better than win32 and what ever the macos equivalent is.
- dflock 6y ago
  That doesn't look like it supports Gemini?
  - app4soft 6y ago
    FTR, here is workaround for Links2 to be able send pages to Gopher server.[0] [0] https://github.com/PhilmacFLy/html2gopher https://github.com/PhilmacFLy/html2gopher
x3blah 6y ago
known servers: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/servers/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/serve... spec: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/spec-spec.txt https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/... docs: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/ software: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/software/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/softw... test ur gemini client: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.conman.org/test/torture/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.conman.org/test/torture... using the protocol ... known servers printf 'gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/servers/\r\n' |openssl s_client -connect gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 -ign_eof spec printf 'gemini.circumlunar.space/spec/spec-spec.txt\r\n'|socat - ssl:gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 docs echo -e '/docs\r\n' |socat - ssl:gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 software echo -e '/software\r\n'|socat - ssl:gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 protocol allows for virtual hosting but does not (need to) use sni printf '/software/\r\n' |openssl s_client -connect 168.235.111.58:1965 -servername gemini.circumlunar.space -ign_eof printf 'gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/software/\r\n' |openssl s_client -connect 168.235.111.58:1965 -ign_eof
treve 6y ago
In case people want to build this on Ubuntu, I needed the following apt install build-essential rustc cargo libgtk-3-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libssl-dev Gemini sites load so fast, it's a little crazy. I played around with Gopher a bit, but mostly through browser add-ons and proxies. A native text-only browser is very fast.
TheUndead96 6y ago
This is cool as hell
txdv 6y ago
What gtk theme are you using? It looks so old school
- julienXX 6y ago
  It's a ripoff of NsCDE Irix theme https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
hawski 6y ago
Looks very nice. Please, add also basic HTML (no CSS, no JS) rendering. Link tags like next in header are sometimes used to add some structure, that is seldom exposed by browsers.
- julienXX 6y ago
  Thought about it but I prefer to focus on alternative protocols for now.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Dropping in to encourage you to not add HTML/CSS/other web shit. We already have web browsers, and I appreciate that you're working on something distinct. Keep up the good work.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Interesting project, but can't we already do this with an ordinary browser? The modern web still supports lightweight pages (like HackerNews).
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  from https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt > In particular, Gemini strives for simplicity of client implementation. Modern web browsers are so complicated that they can only be developed by very large and expensive projects. This naturally leads to a very small number of near-monopoly browsers, which stiffles innovation and diversity and allows the developers of these browsers to dictate the direction in which the web evolves. ... > Experiments suggest that a very basic interactive client takes more like a minimum of 100 lines of code, and a comfortable fit and moderate feature completeness need more like 200 lines. But Gemini still seems to be in the ballpark of these goals. ... > Gemini is designed with an acute awareness that the modern web is a privacy disaster, and that the internet is not a safe place for plaintext. Things like browser fingerprinting and Etag-based "supercookies" are an important cautionary tale: user tracking can and will be snuck in via the backdoor using protocol features which were not designed to facilitate it. Thus, protocol designers must not only avoid designing in tracking features (which is easy), but also assume active malicious intent and avoid designing anything which could be subverted to provide effective tracking. This concern manifests as a deliberate non-extensibility in many parts of the Gemini protocol.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Perfect, thanks. It seems to me these goals could be achieved while retaining browser compatibility. Just define a strict, automatically verifiable subset of the modern web stack. This could be privacy-friendly, and support easy implementation, while making it enormously more approachable, no? How does their transport protocol stack up against HTTPS/TLS? Is there unnecessary complexity that can be avoided by reinventing the wheel here?
    - brabel 6y ago
pmlnr 6y ago
I went through the docs of gemini to see an example of how a gemini file should look like, only to realize, that it's a flavour of markdown. Or at least that's what I understood.
julienXX 6y ago
Hi there, I'm the maintainer of Castor, if you have questions feel free to ask! I also make a ncurses command line client Asuka https://git.sr.ht/~julienxx/asuka https://git.sr.ht/~julienxx/asuka
- petercooper 6y ago
  I've written up some notes as I went on running Castor on macOS (which I'm guessing was not a target platform) in case anyone finds it useful or you need to point people to such: https://tcp.rip/text/misc/install-castor.txt.html https://tcp.rip/text/misc/install-castor.txt.html The settings used by `install` break on macOS, btw, where it's (annoyingly) -d instead of -D to create directories, so I've just been running it directly from the releases folder for now. I am not used to using GTK on macOS but the performance is not good, but it does run and loads pages.
petercooper 6y ago
I maintain a .plan file and finger server at peter@tcp.rip / finger://peter@tcp.rip/ if you want to try something out.
- taborj 6y ago
  I need to get my NodeMCU weather station back online so I can feed it to my .plan file and run fingerd again. Back in the 90s, it was good fun seeing all the stuff people put out on finger. Aside from the link someone else posted to Shodan, is there a list of finger servers anywhere?
  - sloum 6y ago
    The author of Castor hosts an awesome finger server. Try finter://typed-hole.org (fingering the main host will give you a list of quirky options, including how to get the current server cpu temperature)
anthk 6y ago
Gemini needs a sacc like client: - written in C - Dumb simple - Fast Bombadillo is a bit sluggish for my taste.
- sloum 6y ago
  Bombadillo dev here. When you say sluggish do you mean at the transmission layer or in the user experience? I'm working on adding in some concurrency for both screen drawing and requests that should eventually result in increased speed for the user when navigating around (less blocking going on overall). Sadly, I am a little ways away from having time to complete it. Would love patches if you are interested though ;) Also: I definitely agree a sacc-like client would be great!
  - anthk 6y ago
    screen refreshing is -sometimes- slow, getting the content is as fast as sacc. .go version go version go1.13.1 openbsd/amd64 Also, I'd love to go back/forward with h/l.
    - sloum 6y ago
      I can definitely add h/l into the next release :) As to the screen refresh, I am not in love with the current method for screen drawing and hope to have that incrementally improved over time. Thanks for the info/feedback!
qwerty456127 6y ago
"The small Internet" is a really important thing. Broadband access is not nearly as ubiquitous outside major cities as people believe. People in rural areas may have slow and unreliable (and probably expensive at the same time) connections and retro hardware. I've read about children climbing up old towers and waiting hours (!) for the school website to load so they can access their homework during the quarantine days. I bet the same information could be delivered in seconds if that was a Gemini or a Gopher page rather than a "modern" web page bloated with JavaScript frameworks and everything. I would even suggest discussing an idea of making maintaining a good lo-fi (e.g. Gemini/Gopher or pure HTML) site mandatory for organizations of certain kinds, the same way having wheelchair ramps and proper fire safety equipment is required.
- caribousoup 6y ago
  I think this is the wrong solution. We need strong whitelist controls in all of the browsers. Because when you connect to a website, you have no idea if it's going to start downloading 30 MB worth of images and 40 Javascript requests. It's gone completely out of control. I say this as a web dev on a rural connection. Not only is it slow, I PAY for this, bandwidth is limited. For some lazy dev who doesn't compress their images, and it downloads without me noticing, I pay actual money for that. If browser preferences has options for auto disabling Javascript on a webpage that initiated X amount of outbound connections, or auto stops when there are 30 img requests on page load, I should be in control of not allowing that. I should be in control of setting that threshold for different request types. We don't need a second, lightweight web. We need to fix our tooling at the client level.
  - qwerty456127 6y ago
    > If browser preferences has options for auto disabling Javascript on a webpage that initiated X amount of outbound connections, or auto stops when there are 30 img requests on page load, I should be in control of not allowing that. I should be in control of setting that threshold for different request types. I doubt this is hard to implement. Somebody can build a Firefox/Chromium fork (or even an extension perhaps?) implementing this functionality and they don't have to be a real genius. Once I needed that for some time I just used a local proxy to cache and limit what is downloaded. The only problem is the actual web sites are not designed with the fact somebody might want to control them this way in mind and can easily happen to be unusable unless you let them download a ton of stuff. I doubt the problem can be solved without some sort of enforcement by a major power (Google, governments or whatever). At the same time trying to enforce anything on the existing web doesn't seem making much sense to me.
edraferi 6y ago
These technologies could be used to create a valuable network of low-distraction reference resources. They might dodge the Eternal September problem simply due to the the high barrier to entry and win mindshare among sophisticated users by delivering real value. This would require a community focus on tooling and content. First, common tools must support Gopher/Gemini output: * Pandoc * Template engines like Jinja and Mustache * Static site generators like Hugo, Gatsby & Jekyll * Webservers like Apache and Caddy Then those tools can be used to mirror content like: * Wikipedia * ReadTheDocs * Docsets (eg for Dash) * HackerNews, Lobste.rs, Reddit? * RFC archives * Github/Gitlab repo READMEs Suddenly you could spend your whole day in pure-text mode and never open a browser that does enough twitter to kill your flow.
- sloum 6y ago
  There is currently a partial lobste.rs mirror hosted at typed-hole.org over gemini (as well as gopher). Gopher also has gopherpedia which mirrors wikipedia (many clients for gemini also support gopher). While I dont think mirroring should be the end goal, I agree it is a good stepping stone to original content to have , as you put it, low-distraction access to these resources. Recent work has gone on to allow git cloning over gemini and there is syntax support for the, admittedly minimal, text/gemini format in vim and emacs. I would love to see pandoc support (and believe someone recently mentioned working on on the mailing list). Great ideas! Pick one and build!

251 points by kick 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kick 6y ago

For anyone curious, because Gemini is relatively new and kind of has flown under the radar: ### 1.1 What is Gemini? Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design strives to maximise its "power to weight ratio", while keeping its weight within "acceptable" limits. Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious. You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right back to its essence" or as "Gopher, souped up and modernised a little", depending upon your perspective. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt Gopher and finger should be obvious, but just in case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol

apatters 6y ago
I was delighted when I saw that Gemini is maintained by someone on SDF (named Solderpunk, never heard of him before). This seems as good a time as any to plug https://sdf.org https://sdf.org, a great little community which has the feel of a 90s BBS that never went offline.
- kick 6y ago
  The site isn't at www.sdf.org for the record, it's just at sdf.org. There's a big difference in what you'll find!
  - apatters 6y ago
    Don't know how I missed that, I've updated my link!
  - treve 6y ago
    I'm getting redirected from www.sdf.org to sdf.org, but now I'm curious.
    - kick 6y ago
      Try this, which should bring you to MetaArray stuff: https://www.sdf.org/ https://www.sdf.org/ (It's what was originally linked to.)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- visiblink 6y ago
  Speaking of great little BBS-like communities, Solderpunk is actually the admin of zaibatsu.circumlunar.space.
- piffey 6y ago
  Forever grateful for SDF. Graduated into the last depression, was super broke, my computer died, and I could barely get hours between two restaurant jobs just to make rent. For about 3 years used SDF from the library to keep my dev spaces up, learned to work entirely from the terminal. Now I rarely leave one. Should log back in on there. Had all the tools for doing work and for learning bits about computings past.
- rdrey 6y ago
  Wow, this lead me down quite a rabbit hole. I hadn't heard of SDF, thanks!
cookiengineer 6y ago
From an implementor's view I decided to not implement Gemini as it is specified, because I do not like its text/gemini default format. They should either decide for a specified full file format, e.g. CommonMark or HTML5 (with index.html as default routes) or don't try to implement a file format inside a network protocol at all. In my opinion, file structures (and layouts thereof) should have nothing to do with a network protocol. The reason why the web exploded was because HTML was the best technology to allow custom web pages, and more importantly, while in parallel to allow them to interlink. If either of these two aspects are separated, the concept won't work for the discovery and exploration of new content. Remember the sparkling unicorn gifs and construction animations everywhere? That's what the web was about. I do not agree with how JS has exploded over the years, hence the reason for writing my own web browser/scraper/proxy [1] - but I do agree with the "why" HTML5/CSS3 makes sense for themselves while ignoring the scriptable aspects. For me, as someone trying to build a web browser, the text/gemini concept makes it super-hacky and very much prone to future errors to integrate it with the rest of the web. Faking and rendering another file format (based on the runtime environment) should not be its recommendation. A much simpler approach would be e.g. simply using "gemini://" for resources inside an HTML(5) file. Additionally, a killer feature for HTTP/1.1 is the continuous download of files that have been partially downloaded. While I think the practical implementation of 206 ranges is pretty messed up (looking at you, nginx, who cannot count the amount of ranges requested), I do agree with the positive aspects of it. Something like this has to be integrated into a minimal network protocol, otherwise it cannot be adopted in mobile/2G slow areas. [1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth
- astrobe_ 6y ago
  > The reason why the web exploded was because ... Depends on which big bang you talk about. Gopher lost to HTML because Gopher was TUI-oriented when HTML was GUI-oriented. And Gopher lost a second time when Web 2.0 (JS expansion) occurred. TUI is not so vastly inferior to GUI - at least when it comes to reading and writing and sparse multimedia contents. The Web exploded because GUI appears to be more user-friendly. There are vastly more users that need "friendliness" than users that just need honesty ;-) In my mind, if one wants to suggest an alternative to the Web, one either has to go back to the passive, text-oriented web or one-up the current Web with something even more interactive and even more graphical. In my opinion the only way to achieve successfully the latter is to provide a much easier way to make remote interactive graphical applications, with strong security guarantees of course. I believe that something like Squeak could do that job. It kind of already was done with Croquet/Cobalt. As for the former approach, I would suggest 80 columns monospace text as the standard document format, with the footnote-style convention for links - not some oddity that's midway between text and HTML. So in both case I think one has to be extreme in order to succeed. Either extreme sophistication or extreme simplicity.
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
any idea about how to make the font in castor bigger? the default size is impossible for me to read. I tried the usual keyboard shortcuts but doesn't work. Do I have to set some gtk env variables maybe so it uses the correct size font?
- julienXX 6y ago
  Somebody (you?) asked for this feature this morning. I'll add it to the settings. For now it takes your default GTK3 font so I think you can change it globally somewhere.
  - DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
    thanks for getting back. You're right it was in the config file, my problem was that I had the font name surrounded by quotes and so it wasn't recognized. This works: cat .config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini [Settings] gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=true gtk-font-name = DejaVu Sans Regular 12 ... for some reason ~/.gtkrc-2.0 needs variable values quoted, but gtk-3.0 doesn't.

ddevault 6y ago

The Gemini protocol is cool. I've been thinking about writing an implementation of it, and perhaps eventually a *.sr.ht frontend for it. I think the browsers have a lot of work to do before they're pleasant to use, though.

achillean 6y ago

There are still a few Gopher and Finger services on the Internet. * Gopher: https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A70+gopher https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A70+gopher * Finger: https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=product%3Afingerd https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=product%3Afingerd

kick 6y ago
There are a lot of Gopher ones! Reports of the death of Gopher have been (mostly) exaggerated; it's probably got more users now than it did at its peak.
- battery_cowboy 6y ago
  Doesn't that make this it's peak?
  - kick 6y ago
    If it's got a smaller percentage of on-line users on it, is it really peaking?
    - battery_cowboy 6y ago
      Good point!
stevekemp 6y ago
By coincidence I added a trivial finger-server to my golang utility toolbox today: https://github.com/skx/sysbox https://github.com/skx/sysbox Create ~/.plan and clients can query it remotely, just like in the old days.

agumonkey 6y ago

Typically what I like, frugal and light. Nice.

xellisx 6y ago

IIRC, John Carmack used finger for blogging for the longest time.

petercooper 6y ago
He did. There are numerous archives of them, and they seem to do well on HN when they're posted every year or two. https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

macintux 6y ago

Recent discussion of Gemini: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424

aninteger 6y ago

I thought this was using Motif based on the screenshots. Man, imagine how much lighter it could be if it was actually using the motif toolkit

projektfu 6y ago
I thought so too. Are they running Gtk on mvwm?
- julienXX 6y ago
  It's GTK on FVWM

badsectoracula 6y ago

I've made my own Gopher client[0] some time ago, but TBH after the novelty of making it, eventually i abandoned it because i couldn't find anything interesting in there. The most interesting stuff were either gateways from the web or blogs which also had a web version. On the other hand it was fun making it with how ridiculously simple the Gopher protocol is. Sadly it seems that "Gemini" requires TLS that kills that simplicity - Gopher can implemented by anyone, TLS... i think it is a bit harder. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/

RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
Gemini allows clients to function without TLS, but it limits their access/functionality. I'd be very interested in seeing an attempt at a minimal, portable standalone implementation of TLS suitable for Gemini's needs.
- kick 6y ago
  BearSSL is pretty tiny, though I haven't looked at it beyond a glance at the homepage after a friend linked it. Is it what you had in mind? https://bearssl.org/ https://bearssl.org/
  - RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
    Could be promising. I'll do some reading. Thanks, kick!
    - kick 6y ago
      Always happy to share what I know!
- x3blah 6y ago
  Protocol mandates use of nothing less than TLS v1.2 so one could skip/remove all support for lesser versions.
6y ago

jansc 6y ago

If you prefer a terminal-based browser, there is also ncgopher at https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher. Despite its name, it also has support for gemini browsing, though it still is work in progress. That said, Castor is great! Disclaimer: I'm the author of ncgopher.

app4soft 6y ago

> written in Rust with GTK. This is overhead: worst lang + worst toolkit + worst platform support. Do not hesitate to use Links2.[0] [0] http://links.twibright.com http://links.twibright.com

vhakulinen 6y ago
> worst lang What makes it bad? > worst toolkit Its actually quite decent. > worst platform support How come? GTK works on window, mac, linux (+ BSDs and probably other unix like systems). What else would you be looking for from this kind of software? The platform support is better than win32 and what ever the macos equivalent is.
dflock 6y ago
That doesn't look like it supports Gemini?
- app4soft 6y ago
  FTR, here is workaround for Links2 to be able send pages to Gopher server.[0] [0] https://github.com/PhilmacFLy/html2gopher https://github.com/PhilmacFLy/html2gopher

x3blah 6y ago

known servers: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/servers/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/serve... spec: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/spec-spec.txt https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/... docs: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/ software: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/software/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/softw... test ur gemini client: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.conman.org/test/torture/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.conman.org/test/torture... using the protocol ... known servers printf 'gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/servers/\r\n' |openssl s_client -connect gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 -ign_eof spec printf 'gemini.circumlunar.space/spec/spec-spec.txt\r\n'|socat - ssl:gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 docs echo -e '/docs\r\n' |socat - ssl:gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 software echo -e '/software\r\n'|socat - ssl:gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 protocol allows for virtual hosting but does not (need to) use sni printf '/software/\r\n' |openssl s_client -connect 168.235.111.58:1965 -servername gemini.circumlunar.space -ign_eof printf 'gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/software/\r\n' |openssl s_client -connect 168.235.111.58:1965 -ign_eof

treve 6y ago

In case people want to build this on Ubuntu, I needed the following apt install build-essential rustc cargo libgtk-3-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libssl-dev Gemini sites load so fast, it's a little crazy. I played around with Gopher a bit, but mostly through browser add-ons and proxies. A native text-only browser is very fast.

TheUndead96 6y ago

This is cool as hell

txdv 6y ago

What gtk theme are you using? It looks so old school

julienXX 6y ago
It's a ripoff of NsCDE Irix theme https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

hawski 6y ago

Looks very nice. Please, add also basic HTML (no CSS, no JS) rendering. Link tags like next in header are sometimes used to add some structure, that is seldom exposed by browsers.

julienXX 6y ago
Thought about it but I prefer to focus on alternative protocols for now.
- ddevault 6y ago
  Dropping in to encourage you to not add HTML/CSS/other web shit. We already have web browsers, and I appreciate that you're working on something distinct. Keep up the good work.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

Interesting project, but can't we already do this with an ordinary browser? The modern web still supports lightweight pages (like HackerNews).

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
from https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt > In particular, Gemini strives for simplicity of client implementation. Modern web browsers are so complicated that they can only be developed by very large and expensive projects. This naturally leads to a very small number of near-monopoly browsers, which stiffles innovation and diversity and allows the developers of these browsers to dictate the direction in which the web evolves. ... > Experiments suggest that a very basic interactive client takes more like a minimum of 100 lines of code, and a comfortable fit and moderate feature completeness need more like 200 lines. But Gemini still seems to be in the ballpark of these goals. ... > Gemini is designed with an acute awareness that the modern web is a privacy disaster, and that the internet is not a safe place for plaintext. Things like browser fingerprinting and Etag-based "supercookies" are an important cautionary tale: user tracking can and will be snuck in via the backdoor using protocol features which were not designed to facilitate it. Thus, protocol designers must not only avoid designing in tracking features (which is easy), but also assume active malicious intent and avoid designing anything which could be subverted to provide effective tracking. This concern manifests as a deliberate non-extensibility in many parts of the Gemini protocol.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Perfect, thanks. It seems to me these goals could be achieved while retaining browser compatibility. Just define a strict, automatically verifiable subset of the modern web stack. This could be privacy-friendly, and support easy implementation, while making it enormously more approachable, no? How does their transport protocol stack up against HTTPS/TLS? Is there unnecessary complexity that can be avoided by reinventing the wheel here?
  - brabel 6y ago

pmlnr 6y ago

I went through the docs of gemini to see an example of how a gemini file should look like, only to realize, that it's a flavour of markdown. Or at least that's what I understood.

julienXX 6y ago

Hi there, I'm the maintainer of Castor, if you have questions feel free to ask! I also make a ncurses command line client Asuka https://git.sr.ht/~julienxx/asuka https://git.sr.ht/~julienxx/asuka

petercooper 6y ago
I've written up some notes as I went on running Castor on macOS (which I'm guessing was not a target platform) in case anyone finds it useful or you need to point people to such: https://tcp.rip/text/misc/install-castor.txt.html https://tcp.rip/text/misc/install-castor.txt.html The settings used by `install` break on macOS, btw, where it's (annoyingly) -d instead of -D to create directories, so I've just been running it directly from the releases folder for now. I am not used to using GTK on macOS but the performance is not good, but it does run and loads pages.

petercooper 6y ago

I maintain a .plan file and finger server at peter@tcp.rip / finger://peter@tcp.rip/ if you want to try something out.

taborj 6y ago
I need to get my NodeMCU weather station back online so I can feed it to my .plan file and run fingerd again. Back in the 90s, it was good fun seeing all the stuff people put out on finger. Aside from the link someone else posted to Shodan, is there a list of finger servers anywhere?
- sloum 6y ago
  The author of Castor hosts an awesome finger server. Try finter://typed-hole.org (fingering the main host will give you a list of quirky options, including how to get the current server cpu temperature)

anthk 6y ago

Gemini needs a sacc like client: - written in C - Dumb simple - Fast Bombadillo is a bit sluggish for my taste.

sloum 6y ago
Bombadillo dev here. When you say sluggish do you mean at the transmission layer or in the user experience? I'm working on adding in some concurrency for both screen drawing and requests that should eventually result in increased speed for the user when navigating around (less blocking going on overall). Sadly, I am a little ways away from having time to complete it. Would love patches if you are interested though ;) Also: I definitely agree a sacc-like client would be great!
- anthk 6y ago
  screen refreshing is -sometimes- slow, getting the content is as fast as sacc. .go version go version go1.13.1 openbsd/amd64 Also, I'd love to go back/forward with h/l.
  - sloum 6y ago
    I can definitely add h/l into the next release :) As to the screen refresh, I am not in love with the current method for screen drawing and hope to have that incrementally improved over time. Thanks for the info/feedback!

qwerty456127 6y ago

"The small Internet" is a really important thing. Broadband access is not nearly as ubiquitous outside major cities as people believe. People in rural areas may have slow and unreliable (and probably expensive at the same time) connections and retro hardware. I've read about children climbing up old towers and waiting hours (!) for the school website to load so they can access their homework during the quarantine days. I bet the same information could be delivered in seconds if that was a Gemini or a Gopher page rather than a "modern" web page bloated with JavaScript frameworks and everything. I would even suggest discussing an idea of making maintaining a good lo-fi (e.g. Gemini/Gopher or pure HTML) site mandatory for organizations of certain kinds, the same way having wheelchair ramps and proper fire safety equipment is required.

caribousoup 6y ago
I think this is the wrong solution. We need strong whitelist controls in all of the browsers. Because when you connect to a website, you have no idea if it's going to start downloading 30 MB worth of images and 40 Javascript requests. It's gone completely out of control. I say this as a web dev on a rural connection. Not only is it slow, I PAY for this, bandwidth is limited. For some lazy dev who doesn't compress their images, and it downloads without me noticing, I pay actual money for that. If browser preferences has options for auto disabling Javascript on a webpage that initiated X amount of outbound connections, or auto stops when there are 30 img requests on page load, I should be in control of not allowing that. I should be in control of setting that threshold for different request types. We don't need a second, lightweight web. We need to fix our tooling at the client level.
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  > If browser preferences has options for auto disabling Javascript on a webpage that initiated X amount of outbound connections, or auto stops when there are 30 img requests on page load, I should be in control of not allowing that. I should be in control of setting that threshold for different request types. I doubt this is hard to implement. Somebody can build a Firefox/Chromium fork (or even an extension perhaps?) implementing this functionality and they don't have to be a real genius. Once I needed that for some time I just used a local proxy to cache and limit what is downloaded. The only problem is the actual web sites are not designed with the fact somebody might want to control them this way in mind and can easily happen to be unusable unless you let them download a ton of stuff. I doubt the problem can be solved without some sort of enforcement by a major power (Google, governments or whatever). At the same time trying to enforce anything on the existing web doesn't seem making much sense to me.

edraferi 6y ago

These technologies could be used to create a valuable network of low-distraction reference resources. They might dodge the Eternal September problem simply due to the the high barrier to entry and win mindshare among sophisticated users by delivering real value. This would require a community focus on tooling and content. First, common tools must support Gopher/Gemini output: * Pandoc * Template engines like Jinja and Mustache * Static site generators like Hugo, Gatsby & Jekyll * Webservers like Apache and Caddy Then those tools can be used to mirror content like: * Wikipedia * ReadTheDocs * Docsets (eg for Dash) * HackerNews, Lobste.rs, Reddit? * RFC archives * Github/Gitlab repo READMEs Suddenly you could spend your whole day in pure-text mode and never open a browser that does enough twitter to kill your flow.

sloum 6y ago
There is currently a partial lobste.rs mirror hosted at typed-hole.org over gemini (as well as gopher). Gopher also has gopherpedia which mirrors wikipedia (many clients for gemini also support gopher). While I dont think mirroring should be the end goal, I agree it is a good stepping stone to original content to have , as you put it, low-distraction access to these resources. Recent work has gone on to allow git cloning over gemini and there is syntax support for the, admittedly minimal, text/gemini format in vim and emacs. I would love to see pandoc support (and believe someone recently mentioned working on on the mailing list). Great ideas! Pick one and build!