Gophering in Chawan
Fri, 24 Oct 2025 08:29:17 +0200
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Having a  second look at using  Chawan instead of Lynx  as a gopher
client this morning, I made the happy discovery that I can pipe the
current page through an external command and have it display in the
current instance of Chawan. This is something Lynx cannot do.

For example, in ~/.config/chawan/config.toml

[page]
'!' = "pager.externFilterSource('/usr/bin/rdrview -H',null,
'text/html')"

filters the current page  through  rdrview,  but  it  displays  the 
inline images if in config.toml you have set:

[buffer] 
images = true

You can toggle the image display with 'alt i'

The other  interesting thing is that  you can scroll line  by line.
Lynx enables a minimum of half page scrolling.

By default, previous/next pages are  handled by ',' and '.' instead
of  the left/right  arrow keys. As I  have a  French keyboard,  '.'
is obtained with 'shift ;' so I've modified  this  in  config.toml:

[page] 
';' = 'cmd.pager.nextBuffer'

Chawan also seems to do a better job  with  mailcap  entries.  It's 
temporary files keep the original file extension, where Lynx looses
it.

Oh and text emphasis like bold are displayed, something  else  Lynx
doesn't do.

So yes, this is getting very interesting.  Chawan  also  recognises
gemini urls,  unlike Lynx,  allowing seamless gopher,  web, gemini,
finger, and ftp browsing

More to come on this subject.

Screenshots:
gopher://spike.nagatha.fr/I/images/gopher-in-chawan-1.png
gopher://spike.nagatha.fr/I/images/gopher-in-chawan-2.png