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Getting started is easy with downloadable binaries for multiple platforms. Just make sure you pick the right binary for your CPU architecture. This worked for me on Ubuntu Linux 22.02 with aarch64 kernel.
wget https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/releases/download/v1.9.2/amfora_1.9.2_linux_arm64 mv amfora_1.9.2_linux_arm64 amfora chmod u+x amfora ./amfora
Running amfora the first time brings you to the new tab page which helpfully provides instructions about how to navigate and find more help. It also explains how to customize this page by editing newtab.gmi which is a very nice touch! The documentation on the Amfora Wiki is excellent, and very much worth reading if you're going to use Amfora for more than a few minutes.
Screenshot of amfora's default newtab.gmi
After pressing ? to view the help page I realize that amfora works best when the terminal width is at least 120 columns. Any less than that, and the text wrapping on the help page gets a bit weird. Unfortunately, I often found myself pressing "q" from the help page, which immediately exits the browser and loses all my tabs. After a while I learned to press Esc, but maybe "q" should only exit help instead of the whole application.
Screenshot of amfora help at 120 columns wide
Screenshot of amfora help at 80 columns wide
The address bar at the bottom nicely incorporates search functionality from geminispace.info.
Navigating to any of the first 10 links on a page is simple and direct -- just press the number 1-9 (or 0 for the 10th link) to immediately follow the link. Or press "b" to go back. Unfortunately, following links after the first 10 is less intuitive. You can repeatedly tab through links to select. Or you can press the spacebar to jump to the address bar, then type "new:11" to open a numbered link in a new tab. It would be nice to have a brief "quiet period" after entering the first digit so that following the 11th link was as easy following the 1st. It would also be nice to have a hotkey that goes "up" one level (removes the last component from the URL path).
Handling of www links leaves something to be desired. I'm shown an error message that says "No display server was found" but doesn't show the link I was trying to follow. I found that I could get the underlying URL by tabbing through links, and the selected link is shown at the bottom. Pressing "c" is supposed to copy the link, but in my experience it just hangs the application and I need to kill my SSH session to escape.
Screenshot of error message "no display server was found"
Tabbed browsing is good. Open a new tab with Ctrl-T then use F1 and F2 to cycle backward/forward through tabs. If a link is currently selected, ctrl-T will open the selected link in a new tab.
Nic's Rating: 4/5 stars ★★★★☆
Review date: 2022-06-06
