Gopher - plain text is beautiful
Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 8:15 pm
WTF?
The problem with modern websites in non-graphical browser is, that modern websites are not designed for plain text browsing. 125'000 years ago, our forefathers used the gopher TCP/IP protocol to communicate information. You can still access some of these servers - dating back to the Penultimate Interglacial Period - on your modern Linux machines.
Installation
Start
stay in your terminal, and enter:
you will be greeted with a beautiful main menu.
Navigation
You see that there are numbers in square brackets in front of items. You can either use the arrow keys up/down and Enter to select, or simply type in the item number you are interested in. But first, place this page in your bookmark by press the letter 'a'. You can open bookmarks by pressing 'v', later. Press Enter and get back to the server's main menu.
As next, enter '51', for example, that's the News section, then '29' for wikinews, and you might press 'a' again to add this to your bookmarks for quick access.
To change the server, press 'o' -- in the following dialog, enter "gopher.quux.org" or "z3bra.org" (no quotes) as hostname, then ^X
Configuration
Pressing 'O' (that's a cap Olivia) you can pop up the Options menu. This is like editing the ~/.gopherrc file, so you can also use your standard editor to change values - the Options menu is a bit more comfortable, as it shows you selection items.
I noticed that sometimes ^C does not cancel or bring you back one step, in this case try ^X (for Accept).
Of course you need to set your preferred viewers for different file types (if applicable) in the Display Options. The default xv to open images is gone from Debian since Potato or so, your options might be w3m-img's w3mimgdisplay library, for example, or fbi/fbv. Or you just set it to feh in X11.
Conclusion
Pure fun, IMO.
The problem with modern websites in non-graphical browser is, that modern websites are not designed for plain text browsing. 125'000 years ago, our forefathers used the gopher TCP/IP protocol to communicate information. You can still access some of these servers - dating back to the Penultimate Interglacial Period - on your modern Linux machines.
Installation
Code: Select all
sudo apt-get install gopherStart
stay in your terminal, and enter:
Code: Select all
gopher gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/Navigation
You see that there are numbers in square brackets in front of items. You can either use the arrow keys up/down and Enter to select, or simply type in the item number you are interested in. But first, place this page in your bookmark by press the letter 'a'. You can open bookmarks by pressing 'v', later. Press Enter and get back to the server's main menu.
As next, enter '51', for example, that's the News section, then '29' for wikinews, and you might press 'a' again to add this to your bookmarks for quick access.
To change the server, press 'o' -- in the following dialog, enter "gopher.quux.org" or "z3bra.org" (no quotes) as hostname, then ^X
Configuration
Pressing 'O' (that's a cap Olivia) you can pop up the Options menu. This is like editing the ~/.gopherrc file, so you can also use your standard editor to change values - the Options menu is a bit more comfortable, as it shows you selection items.
I noticed that sometimes ^C does not cancel or bring you back one step, in this case try ^X (for Accept).
Of course you need to set your preferred viewers for different file types (if applicable) in the Display Options. The default xv to open images is gone from Debian since Potato or so, your options might be w3m-img's w3mimgdisplay library, for example, or fbi/fbv. Or you just set it to feh in X11.
Conclusion
Pure fun, IMO.