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Authors: Ben <benulo@systemli.org>
Dated: 2021-03-22
Way back in the day I did a fairly comprehensive review of the Gemini clients I had tried, found here:
gemini://kwiecien.us/logarion/gemini-client-review.gmi
Not quite a year has passed, but it feels like such a long time. Aside from some very tiny revisions I have not otherwise updated my reviews or added more, and I feel that I should have done this sooner because one kind user on Gemini is also collecting reviews of clients. I hope we can do that for servers too later. :)
The purpose of this post is not to review all known clients, but I'd like to revisit the ones that I personally use the most or feel merit the most attention. So, without further ado:
First on my list alphabetically, but also certainly one of the clients meriting the most attention, comes Amfora. I consider this one of the "rock star" clients of Gemini, so it's likely that anyone who has used Gemini has used Amfora at some point. If you've never used it, it is incumbant upon you to at least try it out.
Amfora is very feature-rich, and in the past year it has been undergoing near-constant development. I track my clients primarily using git, and I often pull the repos every day. Amfora, like most of the clients in this post, is one of the few whose development never stagnated. It hardly seems to have slowed down.
In spite of being a terminal client, Amfora is far from basic. One of its defining characteristics, especially for a terminal browser, is that it displays pages in a beautiful manner rather than simply dumping text onto the screen. Having visual formatting in an aesthetically pleasing way goes a long way to helping make the user experience on Gemini great.
Any system worth its salt should at least have Amfora installed. Its creator provides binaries for just about all systems and archs imaginable, thanks to the power of Go:
https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/releases
What has changed in the last eight months or so? Well, it's hard for me to tell. Amfora is still the great browser it was when I first started using it. The high level of quality has been pretty consistent with this one, just like the others in my review. It also has some new features that I'm admittedly not familiar with and haven't used yet, like client certificates and built-in subscription.
Another client I use quite a lot (actually, it's my main client), is the all-powerful Diohsc. As a command-based client, I would call it "non-visual" in comparison to something like Amfora, but Diohsc does have a few visual perks like colored output and some light formatting touches. However, after so much experience using Diohsc, I would have to say probably the client's biggest downside is that the way pages are output is not that visually ergonomic. To be honest, the output is sometimes a little hard to read or track with the eye, but Diohsc more than makes up for it by providing the user with all sorts of valuable information about what they are looking at. Every little thing Diohsc does is meaingful and relates to some feature or function performed by the client.
Not only is Diohsc so amazingly efficient, but it is also powerful and flexible. You are given all kinds of freedom to handle the way you browse, with some very advanced functions I think no other client has. I always found navigating Gemspace to be the easiest and most intuitive with Diohsc. With symbolic commands, I can fly through content freely as well as in an organized and methodical manner. A few keystrokes lets you do anything really; shortcuts to bookmarks, complex queueing, complex relational navigation, going back through history, and the ability to handle whatever content is being served to you. Any data streamed to the client can be piped out to an external program or exported to a file.
Clearly, Diohsc is a programmer's tool. I recommend it for the power user, but not for the light or casual user.
Diohsc is lovingly maintained and still an active project; I received the latest updates to the source only a few days ago.
On the graphical end of the client list, Lagrange really stole the show (at least for me). I'm just going to straight up say that I don't use any graphical client anymore except Lagrange. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate great projects like Kristall (which, by the way, is super active), but Lagrange is just the thing for me. I actually hadn't written about it before in my past reviews, but I talked about it quite a lot on my gemcast.
Lagrange is a gorgeous graphical client with a completely custom UI. Since its release, it has been under constant heavy development, probably more than any client I've seen. To me it was nearly perfect when it first came out, and it's only gotten better. It has kept its signature visual style and unique features, and many more features have been added to make it all the more perfect.
To date, it is the only client that I've used to generate and use a client certificate, something I needed to play Astrobotany. I also mainly use Lagrange only for that (lol), but whenever I need a graphical browser instead of a CLI browser, like when I just want to casually open some Gemini link, Lagrange is there.
There is just something about Lagrange that neatly expresses the spirit of Gemini, which is the quality of at once being classic/retro while also being shiny/new/fancy. Amfora also gives me that feeling.
Words cannot describe how awesome this client is. Along with Amfora, I consider this a mandatory client for everyone to have. Check it out at:
https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
Another client I never wrote a review for because it didn't exist back then, Ariane is the client I prefer for Android. It is a very simple client but visually pleasing, and it is so easy to install and use. It's conveniently available on the Google Play store, so keeping it up to date is no longer a problem like when it was in early development.
Ariane is not the most feature-rich client, but it does do a lot of nice things. It's also a fast client and runs very well on my aging Samsung, which is like five years old now. I run it on Lineage OS with Android 10, and I found lately that I can't really use Deedum anymore for some reason. (Deedum is, perhaps, the original Gemini client for Android.) That is a shame because I always thought Deedum was a good client, and it has advanced too since it first came out, but on my phone now it's kind of a no-go because it would crash or otherwise run slow. Ariane never gives me any problems.
I wish Ariane had a feature that I feel is very important to graphical clients to keep track of your browsing, which is when you go "back" to a page, it should come up on the screen exactly in the position where you left off. All the other clients I mentioned do this (except Diohsc, but you don't need it because of other functions it has). So the greatest downside to Ariane is that when I'm far down on an index and open a link, I can't go back without losing my place. :/
Ariane could possibly eliminate the need for this by introducing tabs, but I don't think that feature is forthcoming. It also does not seem to be updated very often, so I assume it's in more or less a finished state.
Either way, it gets the job done for when you need to open a Gemini page on Android. It also does support some great features like dark mode, client certificate, and a few other things. It also supports the basic things you need like bookmarking and a home page. I would say on the technical side it's a very impressive client, but the UI just needs a slight improvement.
I remember an early version of it had tab support, but it was buggy and would crash, so the feature was removed. I think that was for the best, and personally I think tabs are overrated anyway. If I were to make a suggestion, I would say that instead of implementing tabs or multiple windows, Ariane could learn from some great non-tabbed powerful clients like Diohsc and maybe even Elpher. A built-in queue function or some advanced browsing functions would be so cool and probably easier to implement programmatically than tabs, which might require a huge overhaul. Keep it single-page!