Looking at long stuff with VF-1
-------------------------------
Tomasino recently asked me[1] how I view his phlog in my VF-1 client,
since it contains a lot of long menus and posts which don't fit on a
single screen. I answered him on IRC last night but figured I should
document my responses here in case anybody else was wondering, and
also because there are some newish ways to handle this problem that I
haven't well publicised yet that old-time VF-1 users might not be
aware of yet. So, here's my definitive guide to looking at long stuff
with VF-1.
In the case of very long menus (e.g. the gopher.club phlogosphere
listing), you should know that after you've visited a menu, entering a
blank line at the prompt, i.e. just hitting Enter, will display the
first 10 items in that menu, then the next 10 items after that each
time you hit it. This lets you gradually page through a long menu
that flowed off the top of your screen. Since normally in this
situation you just want to see the most recent entries (e.g. most
recently updated phlogs, or most recent posts, or whatever), just
whacking Enter once immediately after the long list has loaded is
enough. This is probably my most-often used solution, because it is
just a single keystroke and it quickly becomes a totally automatic
reflex.
Note that this only shows the *selectors* in the menu. The
informational lines are stripped out, just like with "ls". This
usually works fine, but there are certain HEATHENS in Gopherspace who
design menus with *lots* of informational lines providing essential
context to understand the menu and with meaningless, non-unique
selector names. VF-1's "ls" is not much use here. These people are
WRONG and Shai'hulud will come for them, but sometimes they write nice
stuff, so one has to be able to deal with it. Thus...
VF-1 has had a "less" command since the very beginning, but it
originally did not work on menus, only on "real content" (which is to
say anything with an item type other than 1). This was a frequent
source of complaint because of all the HEATHENS who serve their
content as item type 1. VF-1 was originally designed around a very
clean, elegant, beautiful (some might say "strict" or "pedantic")
conceptual model in which menus are menus and content is content, just
like directories and directories and files are files. I have caved on
this issue a bit, and now "less" and a bunch of other stuff also works
on menus, and so you can read long phlog posts by heathens just fine.
As a side effect, you can now also less through long menus like the
SDF phlog listing, which gives you an alternative to the blank-line
pagination technique outlined above, in case you don't like that for
some reason and would rather type 5 keystrokes instead of 1.
Finally, you can run "set auto_page true" (putting in your .vf1rc file
for persistence across sessions if you like it). This will display
menus which are 40 lines long or less normally (you can do e.g. "set
auto_page_threshold 60" if 40 lines is too short for you), but for
menus which are longer than 40 lines, after displaying the first 40 it
will stop (telling you that it has truncated a long menu) and then you
have to use the blank line pagination technique from the beginning of
this post in order to continue down through the rest of the menu.
When operating in this mode, informational lines from the first 40 (or
whatever) lines of the menu *will* be displayed, so you can still see
title ASCII art etc.), but when you page through the rest of the menu
they will be hidden, as per usual for blank-line pagination. Yeah, is
pretty ugly and hackish. I have this mode enabled by default in my
SDF .vf1rc but not in other places, and having lived like this for a
month or so, I don't really like the auto-pagination. It's pretty
ugly in the code as well, so I may remove it. If this sounds like
something you would *like*, please test it in the near future and if
you love it, let me know somehow, Otherwise it might disappear.
In related news, I have been playing with the sacc[2] gopher client
from the bitreich folks over at circumlunar.space, because VF-1 is *by
far* the most bloated thing that sees regular use over in that
beautiful RAM-constrained world of tiny tools. No matter how small
and sleek your Python application is, it still relies on the Python
interpreter, which is not a small thing. I'm thinking of learning
Lua or Go or some other language that is a nice match for
memory-constrained environments. But as for sacc, it certainly is
nice and light, but I have to say after months of VF-1 use, the idea
of having to actually move a kind of cursor item-by-item up or down
through menus to get to where I want to be feels like trying to run
through molasses or something! Also I seem to have hit some weird bug
where I can't select the second item in any menu? I need to look into
that. I assume it is some odd quirk of my environment, because it is
such a glaring bug that if it happened for everybody it would surely
have been spotted and fixed by now.
[1]
gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180322-a-question-for-solderpunk
[2]
gopher://bitreich.org:70/1/scm/sacc
