6 ms·

Offpunk 3.0

190 points by todsacerdoti 9mo ago

sph 9mo ago
> Something wonderful happened on the road leading to 3.0: Offpunk became a true cooperative effort. Offpunk 3.0 is probably the first release that contains code I didn’t review line-by-line. I felt true dread reading a sentence like this. I had to reread to make sure the author means there are other trusted contributors now. As it is often the case these days, some projects are quite proud of announcing that no human has written or reviewed their code.
- ploum 9mo ago
  OP here: Didn’t even come to my mind while writing this. This would be totally against the philosophy of the projects. Don’t worry: I wanted to celebrate humans cooperating over good old emails to write code in their editor without any help ;-)
  - sph 9mo ago
    Thank you for confirming, and congrats for shipping!
j4cobgarby 9mo ago
This looks interesting! I wanted to find more info about the Gemini protocol, and it's annoying how un-searchable it is now due to Google Gemini.
- dr_kretyn 9mo ago
  To be fair, "Gemini" is one of those overused words for projects and it was unsearchable before Google. It's in the same category as Atlas, Nexus and Styx.
- ploum 9mo ago
  Try "gemini protocol", it helps a lot. But, trully, there’s no much to search. The beauty of Gemini is how small it is: all technical informations should be there : https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://geminiprotocol.net/
- karel-3d 9mo ago
  It's as if someone took a look at Gopher and tried to do it in 21st century. It's not bad, but the (intentional) lack of user-input takes the whole experiment back. The only user input is a small search query. It's intentionally set up against building any kind of BBS/Forum. So you need a different way to write and upload, which - in my opinion - kills the whole project. YMMV. Lagrange - the most used browser - used to have something called "Titan" as user upload but that was never specified and nobody used it and I think it's removed from Lagrange now. edit: ah it still supports it (Titan). It just seems there is no server in the world that uses it.
  - NoboruWataya 9mo ago
    If I have a criticism of the protocol it is that gemtext errs too far on the side of simplicity, particularly in not allowing inline links or formatting. I would have preferred if it was closer to markdown. The limited input support doesn't bother me. I don't see the need for social media through Gemini when there are loads of other protocols we can use for that. And even the limited form of input that is supported lets you do a lot if you get creative with it (in fact there are a few social media-like Gemini pages out there).
- esseph 9mo ago
  It's interesting how long we're been using web search, and the total lack of user education on the features. "Gemini protocol" with quotes should help. +Gemini +protocol for more fuzzy, less accurate results
  - ghostly_s 9mo ago
    these operators straight up do not work anymore in any mainstream search engine.
    - esseph 9mo ago
      I use them daily with Google. Works great. You can open several incignito browser tabs to try it out side by side. It's easy to compare! Note: In the US, doing English searches, using a chrome-based browser. Coming in with Firefox WILL give you different search results. Sometimes I do that intentionally (can be useful).
kkfx 9mo ago
I wonder when contemporary developers will (re)invent Emacs/Gnus: the unified inbox for email, feeds, and news, because what really matters are text messages + eventual multimedia content, personal and private scoring to manage them, and a consistent local UI that allows for personal archiving and resharing. I've looked at the Fediverse, objectively with little hope and many design issues, I'm watching Nostr with interest even though it seems more like a rough sketch lacking the ideas to move forward, but that concept of Gnus and Usenet, so simple in itself, still hasn't managed to resurface.
- anthk 9mo ago
  Gnus it's dog slow, be with email or with usenet. I say this as an ex-Emacs user where I even plugged slrn's cache in order to speed up things, but over 100k messages that was unusable in my netbook, even under 64 bit machines and native compilation. Slrn did it better. On RSS, I use sfeed which is more Unix like and I just plumb lynx/links or whatever I like as a reader. And fast, much fast than GNUs, Elfeed or the core RSS reader in Emacs. OTOH, Emacs it's the only libre Usenet reader for Android. Go figure, and that being a dead simple protocol. Despite of that, lots of Thunderbird forks in FDroid didn't adapt the Usenet part yet. Offpunk it's slow but adding multiprocessing with flock (for python3 maybe) would be a piece of cake in order to allow parallel downloads while syncinc.
  - ploum 9mo ago
    offpunk’s slowness has two main sources (while offline): - loading modules at startup (will be solved in 3.1 with lazy loading, patch is pending) - parsing HTML with lot of pictures (because we wait for chafa for each picture) I’m not sure how multiprocessing could really help that much but I would be interested. While online, sure, the blocking http calls are something that will be parallelized in the future
    - anthk 9mo ago
      syncing URL lists should be done in parallel. Something like xargs+flock but under Python.
anthk 9mo ago
There should ve a variable to choose your inline image reader, between chafa, timg, some wrapper around w3mimgdisplay... Harcoding it it's bad.
- ploum 9mo ago
  each tool needs very specific set of options so we can’t just let the user input any command. And offpunk has been built for use with chafa since the start. Timg is just an historical workaround were Chafa had some bugs. But there are currently some discussions about that on the mailing-list.
codeulike 9mo ago
I didn't really get what "a command-line Web, Gemini, and Gopher browser that allows you to work offline" meant, like how is it offline? So I think this is the bit of info I was missing: Every content you visit is cached and can be visited later while offline. If you try to visit a content not available in your cache, it will be marked to be downloaded later. Offpunk allows you to synchronise you computer once every hour, day or week and work offline without being interrupted. (from: https://offpunk.net/whatisoffpunk.html https://offpunk.net/whatisoffpunk.html) So its kindof designed to be offline with occasional sync. Interesting.
dec0dedab0de 9mo ago
This is really interesting, is there a way to provide downloadable caches for websites where that would be legal? I could Imagine just pre-downloading wikipedia, stack overflow, all kinds of documentation, etc. In a compressed and preorganized format instead of scraping it every time.
- ploum 9mo ago
  The cache is pure and straight files-in-folders. This makes it trivial to browse the cache by hand: cd .cache/offpunk/https/news.ycombinator.com/item cat "id=46943752" So it could be trivially shared. The "netcache" tool gives you the cached content or, with --path, returns the path were to find the contentd. The only point is to preserve the file-modification attribute, which serves to know the age of a cached ressource.
- iamnothere 9mo ago
  Kiwix basically provides this. You can use kiwix-serve to serve the downloaded zim files locally.
  - ploum 9mo ago
    I tried to add kiwix support to Offpunk in the early days but kiwix do not support incremental update of the wikipedia database, which makes it a huge pain point.
    - iamnothere 9mo ago
      Yeah, that’s the biggest disadvantage of kiwix. It probably makes their hosting bill enormous as well. Zimdiff/zimpatch was implemented a decade ago so I’m not sure what the holdup is.
sivers 9mo ago
OFFPUNK sounds like a good name for a punk-like movement to rebel against the entire internet and live offline.
- bovermyer 9mo ago
  I feel like that movement already exists but uses a different name. Or doesn't use a name at all.
- ploum 9mo ago
  see that contributed picture: https://offpunk.net/screenshots/resist.png https://offpunk.net/screenshots/resist.png
bovermyer 9mo ago
I was curious, so I tried it out. I ran `apt install offpunk` on my Debian laptop. Then, I ran "offpunk" and got a new terminal prefixed "ON>". Curious, I entered "help" and got a list of topics. A few stood out as immediately interesting, so I tried "open https://benovermyer.com https://benovermyer.com" to open my site. It said I needed to "go" somewhere first. So, I tried "go https://benovermyer.com https://benovermyer.com" instead. That showed me a text preview of my front page, interestingly with content between headers stripped out. OK, that's neat, but now what? So I now tried "open", and this time it opened the page in my browser, Vivaldi. It was my site, sure enough, but cached locally and missing my main image. All the CSS was intact, though. That's as far as I've gotten at this point, but it was an interesting enough experience that I thought I would share. It's a very different flow from what I was expecting.
- ploum 9mo ago
  the "open" open outside. So you go to a site. If the site is not complete, try "v full" (for "view full"). The reason is that there was no unmerdify rule for your site and that readability mistakenly assumes that lot of your site is spam/ads (readability doing that is the reason why we push for unmerdify)
el3ctron 9mo ago
today, my favorite browser.
- ploum 9mo ago
  Me too but I’m OP. Really happy to see I’m not alone!

190 points by todsacerdoti 9mo ago

sph 9mo ago

> Something wonderful happened on the road leading to 3.0: Offpunk became a true cooperative effort. Offpunk 3.0 is probably the first release that contains code I didn’t review line-by-line. I felt true dread reading a sentence like this. I had to reread to make sure the author means there are other trusted contributors now. As it is often the case these days, some projects are quite proud of announcing that no human has written or reviewed their code.

ploum 9mo ago
OP here: Didn’t even come to my mind while writing this. This would be totally against the philosophy of the projects. Don’t worry: I wanted to celebrate humans cooperating over good old emails to write code in their editor without any help ;-)
- sph 9mo ago
  Thank you for confirming, and congrats for shipping!

j4cobgarby 9mo ago

This looks interesting! I wanted to find more info about the Gemini protocol, and it's annoying how un-searchable it is now due to Google Gemini.

dr_kretyn 9mo ago
To be fair, "Gemini" is one of those overused words for projects and it was unsearchable before Google. It's in the same category as Atlas, Nexus and Styx.
ploum 9mo ago
Try "gemini protocol", it helps a lot. But, trully, there’s no much to search. The beauty of Gemini is how small it is: all technical informations should be there : https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://geminiprotocol.net/
karel-3d 9mo ago
It's as if someone took a look at Gopher and tried to do it in 21st century. It's not bad, but the (intentional) lack of user-input takes the whole experiment back. The only user input is a small search query. It's intentionally set up against building any kind of BBS/Forum. So you need a different way to write and upload, which - in my opinion - kills the whole project. YMMV. Lagrange - the most used browser - used to have something called "Titan" as user upload but that was never specified and nobody used it and I think it's removed from Lagrange now. edit: ah it still supports it (Titan). It just seems there is no server in the world that uses it.
- NoboruWataya 9mo ago
  If I have a criticism of the protocol it is that gemtext errs too far on the side of simplicity, particularly in not allowing inline links or formatting. I would have preferred if it was closer to markdown. The limited input support doesn't bother me. I don't see the need for social media through Gemini when there are loads of other protocols we can use for that. And even the limited form of input that is supported lets you do a lot if you get creative with it (in fact there are a few social media-like Gemini pages out there).
esseph 9mo ago
It's interesting how long we're been using web search, and the total lack of user education on the features. "Gemini protocol" with quotes should help. +Gemini +protocol for more fuzzy, less accurate results
- ghostly_s 9mo ago
  these operators straight up do not work anymore in any mainstream search engine.
  - esseph 9mo ago
    I use them daily with Google. Works great. You can open several incignito browser tabs to try it out side by side. It's easy to compare! Note: In the US, doing English searches, using a chrome-based browser. Coming in with Firefox WILL give you different search results. Sometimes I do that intentionally (can be useful).

kkfx 9mo ago

I wonder when contemporary developers will (re)invent Emacs/Gnus: the unified inbox for email, feeds, and news, because what really matters are text messages + eventual multimedia content, personal and private scoring to manage them, and a consistent local UI that allows for personal archiving and resharing. I've looked at the Fediverse, objectively with little hope and many design issues, I'm watching Nostr with interest even though it seems more like a rough sketch lacking the ideas to move forward, but that concept of Gnus and Usenet, so simple in itself, still hasn't managed to resurface.

anthk 9mo ago
Gnus it's dog slow, be with email or with usenet. I say this as an ex-Emacs user where I even plugged slrn's cache in order to speed up things, but over 100k messages that was unusable in my netbook, even under 64 bit machines and native compilation. Slrn did it better. On RSS, I use sfeed which is more Unix like and I just plumb lynx/links or whatever I like as a reader. And fast, much fast than GNUs, Elfeed or the core RSS reader in Emacs. OTOH, Emacs it's the only libre Usenet reader for Android. Go figure, and that being a dead simple protocol. Despite of that, lots of Thunderbird forks in FDroid didn't adapt the Usenet part yet. Offpunk it's slow but adding multiprocessing with flock (for python3 maybe) would be a piece of cake in order to allow parallel downloads while syncinc.
- ploum 9mo ago
  offpunk’s slowness has two main sources (while offline): - loading modules at startup (will be solved in 3.1 with lazy loading, patch is pending) - parsing HTML with lot of pictures (because we wait for chafa for each picture) I’m not sure how multiprocessing could really help that much but I would be interested. While online, sure, the blocking http calls are something that will be parallelized in the future
  - anthk 9mo ago
    syncing URL lists should be done in parallel. Something like xargs+flock but under Python.

anthk 9mo ago

There should ve a variable to choose your inline image reader, between chafa, timg, some wrapper around w3mimgdisplay... Harcoding it it's bad.

ploum 9mo ago
each tool needs very specific set of options so we can’t just let the user input any command. And offpunk has been built for use with chafa since the start. Timg is just an historical workaround were Chafa had some bugs. But there are currently some discussions about that on the mailing-list.

codeulike 9mo ago

I didn't really get what "a command-line Web, Gemini, and Gopher browser that allows you to work offline" meant, like how is it offline? So I think this is the bit of info I was missing: Every content you visit is cached and can be visited later while offline. If you try to visit a content not available in your cache, it will be marked to be downloaded later. Offpunk allows you to synchronise you computer once every hour, day or week and work offline without being interrupted. (from: https://offpunk.net/whatisoffpunk.html https://offpunk.net/whatisoffpunk.html) So its kindof designed to be offline with occasional sync. Interesting.

dec0dedab0de 9mo ago

This is really interesting, is there a way to provide downloadable caches for websites where that would be legal? I could Imagine just pre-downloading wikipedia, stack overflow, all kinds of documentation, etc. In a compressed and preorganized format instead of scraping it every time.

ploum 9mo ago
The cache is pure and straight files-in-folders. This makes it trivial to browse the cache by hand: cd .cache/offpunk/https/news.ycombinator.com/item cat "id=46943752" So it could be trivially shared. The "netcache" tool gives you the cached content or, with --path, returns the path were to find the contentd. The only point is to preserve the file-modification attribute, which serves to know the age of a cached ressource.
iamnothere 9mo ago
Kiwix basically provides this. You can use kiwix-serve to serve the downloaded zim files locally.
- ploum 9mo ago
  I tried to add kiwix support to Offpunk in the early days but kiwix do not support incremental update of the wikipedia database, which makes it a huge pain point.
  - iamnothere 9mo ago
    Yeah, that’s the biggest disadvantage of kiwix. It probably makes their hosting bill enormous as well. Zimdiff/zimpatch was implemented a decade ago so I’m not sure what the holdup is.

sivers 9mo ago

OFFPUNK sounds like a good name for a punk-like movement to rebel against the entire internet and live offline.

bovermyer 9mo ago
I feel like that movement already exists but uses a different name. Or doesn't use a name at all.
ploum 9mo ago
see that contributed picture: https://offpunk.net/screenshots/resist.png https://offpunk.net/screenshots/resist.png

bovermyer 9mo ago

I was curious, so I tried it out. I ran `apt install offpunk` on my Debian laptop. Then, I ran "offpunk" and got a new terminal prefixed "ON>". Curious, I entered "help" and got a list of topics. A few stood out as immediately interesting, so I tried "open https://benovermyer.com https://benovermyer.com" to open my site. It said I needed to "go" somewhere first. So, I tried "go https://benovermyer.com https://benovermyer.com" instead. That showed me a text preview of my front page, interestingly with content between headers stripped out. OK, that's neat, but now what? So I now tried "open", and this time it opened the page in my browser, Vivaldi. It was my site, sure enough, but cached locally and missing my main image. All the CSS was intact, though. That's as far as I've gotten at this point, but it was an interesting enough experience that I thought I would share. It's a very different flow from what I was expecting.

ploum 9mo ago
the "open" open outside. So you go to a site. If the site is not complete, try "v full" (for "view full"). The reason is that there was no unmerdify rule for your site and that readability mistakenly assumes that lot of your site is spam/ads (readability doing that is the reason why we push for unmerdify)

el3ctron 9mo ago

today, my favorite browser.

ploum 9mo ago
Me too but I’m OP. Really happy to see I’m not alone!