# UMN gopher revisited
In my previous post[1] I explained the issues that I recently found
and what I thought might be the best way to address them.
In an effort to resolve the issues, today I wrote a patch[2] for the
latest source tree[3]. I don't claim to be a competent C programmer,
or have any knowledge of ncurses, but I managed to discover enough in
a few hours to make an attempt.
The left margin, which contains the menu index, is now fixed at 8
columns. In its current skinny format[4], it provides enough room for
indexes up to 999999.
There are still problems, as file type suffixes can be appended and I
don't think those are accounted properly for truncation either. But
at least now that the margin doesn't vary in width, there may be more
chance of shaking out the rest of the issues.
## Want to try the patch?
* git clone the latest source tree[3].
* cd into the resulting gopher directory
* download the patch[2] into the same directory
* patch < 0001-Removed-selected-item-indicator-from-left-margin-rep.patch
* ./configure
* gmake (If you are on one of the BSDs you will need this.)
## References
[1](
gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/Display-lines-and-UMN-gopher.md)
[2](
gopher://gopher.icu/0/files/0001-Removed-selected-item-indicator-from-left-margin-rep.patch)
[3](
https://github.com/jgoerzen/gopher.git)
