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"Not that hard, apparently" - Moonlander is back (as an alpha release)

2021-03-20

I am glad to announce that Moonlander is back!

Well, it's not _the_ Moonlander, but rather a rewritten version carrying the same name.

Well, it's not "back" as in "proper 1.0 release without any known issues", but it's _mostly_ there.

So... What happened?

On my previous post about Moonlander, (which you should check out if the title confused you,) I said the following:

If I decide to work on Moonlander though, I will most likely switch to using OS widgets like everyone else. The canvas renderer approach is too much work for little gain, and I am pretty sure I could pull off the fancy-ness of Moonrender with some hacks on top of OS widgets.

Well, I did _just that_. The new Moonlander is entirely GTK 3, without any custom

drawing done whatsoever.

And I think I did a pretty good job [41K PNG Image]

(Ironically enough, Moonlander as the time of writing cannot open images)

The new Moonlander can now, compared to the older one, do more:

It has actual interactivity (select and copy text)
Tabbed browsing support
A bookmarks bar
Proper¹ trust-on-first-use support
Can deal with TLS v1 certificates some servers (including mine) still use for some reason
Shows alt text for preformatted blocks and can collapse them entirely
Can be configured as your default gemini:// handler

There are a few more things planned which you can read about on the README file, but they aren't implemented yet so I am not going to list them for now.

Where do I get it?

Download instructions for Linux binaries. [HTTP, sourcehut repository].

Currently, Moonlander is Linux-only, though it can *theoretically* run on Windows if someone were to set up a build environment with GTK. There are some pointers in the README to some documentation, but I most likely won't be providing Windows binaries any time soon.

Also, while on the "alpha" stage, every commit will be built as a binary as the codebase is moving too fast to version properly. When things slow down, I'll most likely promote it to beta and start versioning properly.

Footnotes

¹: There are a few parts I am not completely sure on, but compared to the old Moonlander that just accepted *everything* I think this is an improvement.

If you do happend to know how TLS works, maybe help out? [HTTP, Mastodon]

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