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Previous: Ce que Gemini a changé pour moi, et découvertes de CLI

15 February 2021

How Gemini has changed me, and CLI discoveries

I have been using CLIs as much as possible for several years now, for obvious reasons of practicality, resource optimization, and because I like to have only the information I need, with no frills. Having a sysadmin background undoubtedly plays a part in this interest.

I have been using some of them, such as mutt, ncmpcpp, youtube-dl, streamlink, for a long time, and I regularly discover new ones over time.

Gemini has changed the way to deal with information. I was addicted to my rss feeds, I migrated all of them to a format that can be used under amfora via a series of scripts that roughly "reads atom http feed" -> "retrieves html pages" -> "converts html to gemini/text" -> "generates gemini feeds". For 95% of them, the feeds are not truncated, for the rare others I use a locally installed proxy, duckling-proxy, which converts the html of the complete articles on the fly to text/gemini.

No more heavy web pages, infernal popups (for newsletters, cookies...), the information is there, in its purest form. It's extremely satisfying to no longer feel this frustration and this feeling of fighting with a system that I can never win against. Gemini is perfectly suited to my needs and I am relieved that I am not alone and that someone has dared to take on this project and that such an enthusiastic community is being formed.

It is through the community that I discovered several tools in CLI that I find really great:

aerc, a very promising mail client that seems infinitely more intuitive than mutt (not difficult). It is not usable in my case at the moment (no management of connection cuts) but is actively developed and I'm following it closely.
ytcc, which I am still testing, that will allow me to abandon my RSS reader entirely. The last remaining feeds are youtube channels (well, invidious, but nevermind), and ytcc will allow me to "delegate" this management automatically.
ttrv, a CLI for reddit; for the record, I had stayed on the old web interface which was simple and efficient, but I have even better now 😁
decent-social-cli, that I have tweaked for my needs, to follow the few twitter (or rather nitter) accounts that interest me

I am therefore moving towards much more sobriety, and I am surprised to see the extent of its benefits. And this is probably only the beginning.

And I really appreciate discovering a community with values that correspond to me and that has already taught me a lot.

Finally, there are some memories that have been running through my mind ever since I discovered Gemini: the terminals from the Fallout series of games, which present information in exactly the same way, in pure text. It's a very strange association, and I hope the comparison between the two worlds will end there...

[EDIT]

It's slightly off topic but I also recently came across qutebrowser, which I had tested a very long time ago, and it has come a long way since then, I've started testing it to replace the monster that Firefox has become and it's pretty satisfying!

github decent-social-cli

github qutebrowser