mastodon reply about gopher
Fri, 05 Dec 2025 10:24:02 +0100
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@hardtech@corteximplant.com

Hi @venelles  I have a question:  what made you choose  Gopher over
www/Gemini? :)

I think that #gemini is a bit overcomplicated, you might as well go
for the #smolweb and benefit from the browsers that everyone has.

I Iove the use of plain text  in #gopher. I don't like the obsolete
selectors, nor the  fact that many clients ignore  them and default
to  mime.types anyway.  I don't  know of  any existing  CSO servers
today, nor  why gif images have  a different selector to  all other
images. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Unfortunately this is heresy.

For example, I  use Chawan as my gopher browser  because I can shut
off selector display and just show an icon for directories. It also
linkifies text so that  any text file can be a  menu. For all other
files mailap manages what application opens which file, whether you
are in X11 or the console.  No selectors needed apart from an input
method (7) the rest are links.

So really  I'm only using  the part of  gopher that fits  my needs,
because there isn't anything else.

I'd love  to be able to  write something more rational  though, but
I'm pretty  much in favour  of multi-protocol browsers  like Chawan
that can accept urls ftp, gopher, gemini, http, finger, spartan and
whatever else  you want  to throw at  it as long  as you  write the
protocol handler.

Yep, I'm a heretic.



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