💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~benk › c8e790c1.gmi captured on 2021-12-05 at 23:47:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Diohsc, the Underrated Client

Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>

Date: 2020-12-29

Anyone who has been following my stuff knows how much I prefer Diohsc over other Gemini clients. And sure, it's not perfect. Some other clients do some things better, but I'm always using Diohsc as my primary client at home, and it's gotten to the point where using another client annoys me because of the lack of some feature that either it doesn't provide or I can't figure out how to invoke it.

For example, I like doing operations relative to the URI. Let's say I'm reading a gemlog post and there's something missing from the file I'm looking at, like the author's contact info or a way back to the index. What should I do? In many clients I would probably have to edit the URI, and in the worst case scenario that might even require copy-pasting it.

In Diohsc, to go to the root of the currect directory I just type `.`, which should generally take you to an index for the content you're looking at. If not, I can `..` to go up the directory tree. Yeap, no problem.

That's something simple and basic, but it has saved me numerous times during my browsing. Not all Gemini content has a uniform structure, so sometimes you have to fiddle with things.

But how about something more complex? Would you like to program/serialize operations? I bet you would!

Today I was looking at a page which included links to four images which were pictures of what the author of the post was talking about. They were links 1, 2, 3, and 4, each a JPG image. Much to my delight, Diohsc will happily load them all in sequence when I ask it to pipe them to `display`, a magick program that can load images from stdin, like so:

`> 1-4 | display`

Yes, that's all I had to type, and I got to inspect the images one a time, with each opening after I closed the previous.

This is only a small taste of what the client can do, and what I feel other clients should be able to do. I know graphical clients offer other means to the same end, and sometimes point-and-click just makes things easier, but for terminal clients features like this really stand out.

Recently I saw a page with a short list of Gemini clients. (I can't remember which one.) I noticed Diohsc was abest from that list, which disappointed me a little bit. The list included all the great clients like Amfora and Lagrange, but maybe the author hadn't heard of Diohsc or never tried it. Oops!

So I thought to myself that it was worthwhile to write this post for anyone who ought to read it. I don't want this impressively powerful and elegant client to be Gemini's best-kept secret.

Edit: Another thing I probably should have mentioned that I noticed Diohsc can do is that it is more than happy to open content on the local file system, so for example I could run `diohsc index.gmi` locally on my gemlog and browse around it. I tried invoking Amfora on a local file like that, but it didn't work! (Also not to trash on Amfora, but I also noticed today that it refuses to open sites with expired TLS certificates, whereas Diohsc kindly allows you to open them as long as you confirm that's what you want.)