2021-04-13
This is a short, extremely basic and purposely beginner-friendly post about how to theme Amfora, my fave CLI gemini browser.
Amfora is created by makeworld.
The software is really simple to use. After installing, press ? to get the help and escape to get out of it. If you press space, you get a prompt on the bottom of the terminal. You can type in a direct gemini location, or if you are browsing a page with links you can type in the number and press enter to jump there. If the link number is less than 10 you can just press the number without hitting space first.
You are viewing this gemini capsule already, so presumably you don't need more info about gemini protocol.
But let's talk about theming. One of the intentions of the Gemini spec as I understand it is that the viewer decides how a page renders, not a page's creator. In other words, text with gemini markup is sent, but no styling (such as CSS). By default the Amfora style is the generic terminal color, but you can actually modify the theme fairly easily.
You can edit the theme by modifying this toml file in your terminal:
~/.config/amfora/config.toml
toml is a markup language. Scroll all the way down to find the [theme] section. You can add hexadecimal html colors here. Note that all of these lines are turned off by default because the line starts with a #. Notice the EXAMPLES in this file. You can follow this model. For example, if you want the background color of Amfora to be light pink you could add this line inside the theme section.
bg = "#ffb3ff"
If you'd like to use someone's premade color scheme, you can visit the User Contributed Themes page on GitHub
User Contributed Themes for Amfora
Simply select the one you'd like, open its toml code, copy and paste over your own config.toml theme section. Save and quit. The next time you start up amfora it will use this theme. If you're worried about making a mistake, you can first duplicate your config.toml and call the old one old.config.toml and store it as a backup.
I contributed the Slimey theme for fans of 80s US Slimecore like Balzac, Hypercolor and You Can't Do That on Television.
Slimey theme example screenshot
Note: As the Amfora software is still young this info about where themes are located and how to alter them could become out of date if ever makeworld changes the theming system for Amfora.
Enjoy!
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