I find it hilarious that most known Gemini clients as of late 2023 use a GUI to display a protocol that is _just plain text_. I don't understand it, nor do I care to ponder the reasoning. My preferred cli client was Amfora, partly because it has great rendering and permits reading Gemini files from the local file-system. Building this on NetBSD was a pain since it required GNU make and a more recent version of Go, but the latest Go version was only 1.4 and thus would not automatically download the many dependencies. I had to cross-compile under Linux. Bombadillo uses slightly less memory and fewer dependencies, but doesn't seem to have colour support.
On OpenBSD, the non-GNU make tool works just fine for both, while the version of Go is 1.21.1. In fact several programs that required GNU make on NetBSD will build without complaints when using OpenBSD's make. This makes me happy. What's even better though, is the telescope browser.
I've seen it listed a few times but never bothered to check it out until now. Written in C and developed on OpenBSD, it seemed like a natural fit since it uses some of the unique security features provided by this awesome OS. It is inspired by the likes of w3m and Emacs, but it provides vi, Emacs and other styles of key-bindings all at the same time. How cool is that? Even better, it combines the things I like most about Amfora, Bombadillo and w3m into one tool. Tabbed browsing? Yes. Coloured links? Got 'em. Support for Gemini, gopher, finger and local file-system? Of course, but with some limitations. Files are only accessible from certain directories by default, and I'm not yet sure if this can be changed. The 'Downloads' directory is one of them, so I can read pages that were saved for off-line use. I suppose it makes sense as it couldn't do a whole lot of damage in the even that it's somehow compromised.
One of the coolest things is support for HTTP proxies, allowing one to surf the "normal web" in geminispace. I tried the duckling proxy and suddenly lost many hours surfing the Marginalia search engine for the first time, finding lots of great content related to OpenBSD with just one query. Later I would play with the Stargate proxy, which provides much nicer rendering of HTTP sites. Using the Stargate Relay search inputs provides access to the Marginalia engine and others from within Gemini clients that support HTTP proxies.
[Stargate Relay](gemini://stargate.gemi.dev:1994)
Most of my web browsing could easily be done through the telescope now, though I still have w3m for when I need to access DuckDuckGo. Both search engines have their place, but they provide different results for the same query. This is a good thing though, and I wish the DDG or Searx search inputs were working (DDG broke their website, Searx search input was broken when I tried it).
There are some bugs in this otherwise awesome browser, most notably one which involves rendering when used in tmux. Sometimes I'll open a split-pane window with the browser on top, but in telescope the scrolling is broken since it will smear the contents of the bottom line (and others) across the page. This never happens in a normal tmux pane and will go away once the split-pane is closed. Trying to open telescope in a split-pane doesn't work either, it just reports "window is too small." and refuses to close, requiring one to use kill(1).
I do hope the telescope continues to be developed, it's certainly the nicest little browers I've used by far, while also being just as lightweight on RAM as w3m (if not lighter).
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