gplaces - a simple terminal Gemini client

Because Gemini deserves a light client with a high power to weight ratio!

gplaces is named after Going Places, the 1965 album by Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass. The "o" is omitted from the executable name so it doesn't mess up tab completion for Gopher users and Go developers.

The gplaces logo is an artist's impression of a Gemini VII capsule with the red accents of a Humes and Berg Stonelined straight trumpet mute. Sort of.

gplaces is originally a Gemini port of the delve Gopher client by Sebastian Steinhauer.

Features

• configurable MIME type handlers
• "powerful" shell with tab completion
• bookmarks use aliases
• subscriptions
  • only simple subscriptions are supported, to avoid XML parsing
• variables
• command aliases use variables
• sh-style history with $XDG_DATA_HOME/gplaces_history or ~/.gplaces_history
• VT100 compatible with ANSI escape sequences
  • with NO_COLOR support
• no exotic external dependencies, no NIH
  • GNU readline is fully optional bestline
  • openssl or libressl
  • libcurl
  • libidn2 or libidn (optional)
  • libmagic (optional)
• SSH-style TOFU with $XDG_DATA_HOME/gplaces_hosts or ~/.gplaces_hosts
• client certificates support via $XDG_DATA_HOME/gplaces_$host$path.{crt,key} or ~/.gplaces_$host$path.{crt,key}
  • auto-generation with user consent
  • strict implementation, the certificate for /foo is used for /foo{,/,/bar}
• internal configurable external pager for text & menus
• support for non-interactive operation
• UTF-8 word wrapping
• hackable, about 1k lines of C code
• ~100K executable when built with -O3 and -Wl,-s on x86_64

How to install?

• using Flatpak: flatpak install flathub com.github.dimkr.gplaces
• compile yourself

How to compile?

• clone this git repo
• just type make or make WITH_LIBIDN2=0 WITH_LIBIDN=0 WITH_LIBMAGIC=0 on any Unix compatible system
  • currently tested on
    • Linux
• type make install to install it on the system (defaults to /usr/local)

How to use?

> gemini.circumlunar.space

to show a Gemini page, type its URL, press ENTER and gplaces will stream the page contents to the terminal.

to abort the download, press CTRL+c.

when the download is finished, gplaces will display the downloaded page using less(1), the same tool man(1) uses to display man pages.

`less -r` has exited with exit status 0
gemini.circumlunar.space/> 

use the arrow keys to scroll, / to search and q to exit less and return to the gplaces prompt.

(reverse-i-search `g') gemini.circumlunar.space

in addition, gplaces adds the page URL to the history: use the Up and Down keys to navigate through the history, or CTRL+r to search through it. these are only three examples of key bindings from shells like bash(1) which work in gplaces, too.

gplaces displays only Gemtext or plain text files: it downloads other kinds of files to temporary files and runs external "handler" programs (one for each file type) defined in the gplaces configuration file.

> save gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi
enter filename (press ENTER for `/home/user/Downloads/specification.gmi`):

to download a file instead of displaying it or saving it to a temporary file, type save, followed by its URL, then press ENTER.

gemini.circumlunar.space/> 2 docs/

gplaces associates a number with each link in the last viewed page. type the number of a link to show its URL, then press ENTER to follow it.

to edit the URL of a link, type the link number, press Tab, edit the URL and press ENTER. for example, this is useful if a link leads to a post in another gemlog, but you want to see its homepage.

gemini.circumlunar.space/> #gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/
gemini.circumlunar.space/> 

the history can be used as a reading list: prefix a URL with # and press ENTER to add it to the history without opening it first. for example, to add the URL of link 2 to the history, type 2, press Tab to edit the URL, press CTRL+a or Home to go to the beginning of the line, type # and press ENTER. to open this URL later, press the Up key, press CTRL+a or Home, press Delete to remove the leading #, then press ENTER.

gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/> save 2
enter filename (press ENTER for `/home/user/Downloads/specification.gmi`):

this number can be used to download the link, too.

gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/> search
Search query> gplaces

the gplaces configuration file allows you to define short aliases for URLs you visit often. for example, the default configuration file defines the home alias for the Gemini project homepage and the search alias for a Gemini search engine. type search and press ENTER to search geminispace.

> geminispace.info/search gplaces
> search gplaces
> search "gemini client"

if a URL accepts input, you can specify the input in a second argument, to avoid another request to the same URL and skip the prompt. this works with aliases, too.

to show a feed of new posts, type sub, then press ENTER. the list of URLs gplaces is "subscribed" to is defined in the configuration file.

to exit gplaces, press CTRL+d.

additional documentation and more details are available in man gplaces. type help and press ENTER to see short descriptions of available commands.

How to contribute?

• send me pull-requests and I'll review and merge them :)
• if you wish to appear on the help authors command just add yourself there

License

• GPLv3

Statistic

Language	files	blank	comment	code
C	1	250	58	1127