What gtk theme are you using? It looks so old school
Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
31–40 of 79 posts
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#32Looks very nice. Please, add also basic HTML (no CSS, no JS) rendering. Link tags like next in header are sometimes used to add some structure, that is seldom exposed by browsers.
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#33There are still a few Gopher and Finger services on the Internet. * Gopher: https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A70+gopher * Finger: https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=product%3Afingerd
There are a lot of Gopher ones! Reports of the death of Gopher have been (mostly) exaggerated; it's probably got more users now than it did at its peak.
Doesn't that make this it's peak?
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#34> written in Rust with GTK. This is overhead: worst lang + worst toolkit + worst platform support. Do not hesitate to use Links2 .[0] [0] http://links.twibright.com
That doesn't look like it supports Gemini?
FTR, here is workaround for Links2 to be able send pages to Gopher server.[0]
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#35For anyone curious, because Gemini is relatively new and kind of has flown under the radar: ### 1.1 What is Gemini? Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design…
From an implementor's view I decided to not implement Gemini as it is specified, because I do not like its text/gemini default format.
They should either decide for a specified full file format, e.g. CommonMark or HTML5 (with index.html as default routes) or don't try to implement a file format inside a network protocol at all.
In my opinion, file structures (and layouts thereof) should have nothing to do with a network protocol.
The reason why the web exploded was because HTML was the best technology to allow custom web pages, and more importantly, while in parallel to allow them to interlink. If either of these two aspects are separated, the concept won't work for the discovery and exploration of new content.
Remember the sparkling unicorn gifs and construction animations everywhere? That's what the web was about.
I do not agree with how JS has exploded over the years, hence the reason for writing my own web browser/scraper/proxy [1] - but I do agree with the "why" HTML5/CSS3 makes sense for themselves while ignoring the scriptable aspects.
For me, as someone trying to build a web browser, the text/gemini concept makes it super-hacky and very much prone to future errors to integrate it with the rest of the web. Faking and rendering another file format (based on the runtime environment) should not be its recommendation.
A much simpler approach would be e.g. simply using "gemini://" for resources inside an HTML(5) file.
Additionally, a killer feature for HTTP/1.1 is the continuous download of files that have been partially downloaded. While I think the practical implementation of 206 ranges is pretty messed up (looking at you, nginx, who cannot count the amount of ranges requested), I do agree with the positive aspects of it.
Something like this has to be integrated into a minimal network protocol, otherwise it cannot be adopted in mobile/2G slow areas.
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of Gopher ones! Reports of the death of Gopher have been (mostly) exaggerated; it's probably got more users now than it did at its peak.
Doesn't that make this it's peak?
If it's got a smaller percentage of on-line users on it, is it really peaking?
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#37Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#38For anyone curious, because Gemini is relatively new and kind of has flown under the radar: ### 1.1 What is Gemini? Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design…
any idea about how to make the font in castor bigger? the default size is impossible for me to read. I tried the usual keyboard shortcuts but doesn't work. Do I have to set some gtk env variables maybe so it uses the correct size font?
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#39> written in Rust with GTK. This is overhead: worst lang + worst toolkit + worst platform support. Do not hesitate to use Links2 .[0] [0] http://links.twibright.com
> worst lang
What makes it bad?
> worst toolkit
Its actually quite decent.
> worst platform support
How come? GTK works on window, mac, linux (+ BSDs and probably other unix like systems). What else would you be looking for from this kind of software? The platform support is better than win32 and what ever the macos equivalent is.
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#40If you prefer a terminal-based browser, there is also ncgopher at https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher. Despite its name, it also has support for gemini browsing, though it still is work in progress. That said, Castor is great!
Disclaimer: I'm the author of ncgopher.