2024-12-07 12:39:22
# Bombadillo notes
## Background
I recently re-discovered the joy of browsing the web from
text-mode clients (such as w3m and eww).
Earlier today I thought about and reflected upon an unsatiable
desire to *write*. About anything. Something happens and I think
of recording it down in some way. An idea crawls into my mind and
I feel like I need to talk about online or in my personal
journal. Otherwise, it feels as though I cannot contain all these
things in my mind, that I will forget everything some day and it
would all be a waste. Come to think of it, I rarely look back on
the things I do end up recording. Sure, old photos and journal
entries are a joy to look over. But in these situations, material
can only be deemed old after at least two years. Most of what I
write ends up being "cringe" to look upon for my future self
anyway.
There are only certain cases where I can think without writing or
speaking about what I'm thinking. For instance, when I'm deeply
absorbed reading or listening to something else, my mind wanders
into either a topic completely unrelated or barely tangential to
the content I am consuming. I found that I think well when I am
supposed to (or initially planned to) do something else. It's
like how people say, their best work is produced when they're
supposed to be doing something else.
Unfortunately, as a social creature, I wish to share my ideas to
friends and people in some communities. I enjoy discussing about
topics from people's personal blogs as well as my own.
Clearly, the best solution is to write on a publicly accessible
place and share the URL with those I want to share the content
with. However, fear and anxiety and other factors contributing to
my writer's block is holding me back. Most of what I want to
write doesn't fit on my primary blog. All the polished stuff goes
there. I can only write somewhere that anyone can access only
when they specifically point there browser to the direct URL.
Put it outside the web and behind the walls of the small internet
for good measure. Many proxies exist that lets me share things to
those who can't access gopher or gemini, if I need to.
I looked into many options.
- Self-hosting (I previously did this, but it was all taken down
when I was moving stuff on my VPS around, and I figured this
isn't a very good long-term solution. Too much overhead that
prevents me from focusing on the actual writing)
- Using online services such as smol.pub. I have revived my
blog/gemlog/phlogs there. Unfortunately, though, smol.pub has a
public discovery feed that I can't seem to opt-out of. It also
seems to be automatically appearing on feed-aggregators such as
skyjake's Cosmos.
- A shared server, such as a pubnix. On rawtext.club, there is
also a similar "discovery feed". The recent(++) tool. I'm fine
with people running their own scripts to discover a list of all
newly updated content from other people's homedirs, but the
recent tool is something most users on RTC know and use. I
don't feel comfortable having my content appearing there every
time I update something. (Note, this phlog, which is currently
hosted on RTC is a little different to the kind of
blog/gemlog/phlog I am describing, and wanting to create)
..
And so on. Testing and exploring options on the small internet
required me to quickly spin up a client on a separate terminal
pane to test out updates on my site (and gopherhole,
etc). Lagrange is my primary smolnet client, but today I reached
for bombadillo, the first gemini and gopher client I ever used
when first discovering this space back in 2020.
As I explored pages from bombadillo, I was reminded of what I
felt like to browse the web from w3m. Simple, quiet, calm. It's a
kind of experience that no GUI can replicate.
In the rest of this post I will record some notes where I
consider using bombadillo as my primary TUI smolnet browser.
----------------------------------------------------------------
## Navigation
j/k move page (similar to J/K in w3m)
b/f or h/l back/forward
d/u move page by 75% of screen
<spc> command
R reload
<tab> toggle between bm and normal panels
## Command
<direct url>
<link idx>
:c[heck] <peek link>
:search (config searchengine)
## Bookmarks
B show bookmarks
:add/:delete
---
Comparison to amfora:
it may be that the version of bombadillo's manpage is a little
outdated, but I couldn't find any configuration related to client
certificates. Amfora also supports a built-in feed reader, which
I don't really need.
I wonder whether multi-line inputs work in bombadillo.
---
Comparison to gelim (NB: my own client):
gelim colorises headings and links in gemini and spartan. I'm
also more familiar with it (otherwise, this post wouldn't exist).
Perhaps I should stick to bombadillo as a finger and gopher
client, and use gelim when I want to browse gemini and spartan
(and nex) from the terminal.
