💾 Archived View for ew.srht.site › en › 2021 › 20210804-elpher-wishlist.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:31:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Alex Schröder has added fancy things to my preferred client elpher:
Actually, I have started writing a little something that allows me to use Elpher for the web. Elpher is a Gopher and Gemini browser for Emacs.
Good! I like that!
One interesting side effect: Emacs has its own bookmarks, mostly for positions in files, but with a framework that lets us extend them to other uses. Eww has its own bookmarks. Elpher used to have its own bookmarks. But I recently managed to switch Elpher bookmarks to the Emacs bookmarks backend, so now I can visit websites using Elpher, and bookmark them, and they end up in Emacs bookmarks ...
Interesting ...
gemini://alexschroeder.ch/page/2021-07-28%20Browsers
It so turns out that this latter part showed up on my machine with the next round of straight-pull-all. Ok, then, give it a try. While I am actuatually all for using built-in stuff in emacs, I don't like this :-(
It would be a little too simple to just leave it at that. So maybe by describing my normal flow I'll find out what exactly bothers me.
I don't really use emacs bookmarks. Which might be a gross underrating of the feature from my side. So I should maybe go an read up on it. However, I do use a very small number of persistent bookmarks to navigate to a few important points in my files. But that is automatic after calling bm-toggle on a given line. And yes it took some fiddling which I recycled from
https://github.com/joodland/bm
So the first thing I saw with the new bookmarks list were these file bookmarks. I sware. However, now that I check up on it, they are gone. Strange.
The other thing is this: the order is now completely mixed uo. I used to edit the bookmarks list and sort it to my liking. I could probably do this again, but I expect the order to change any time I add something.
So I did something else: I created a .gmi file in the format of a capsule index. I already had a little hack from org-mode to open gemini:// links in elpher with the C-c C-o key combo. I open this file (read-only to not mess it up). TAB obviously does not jump to the next link. So I navigate to some link somehow and open elpher from there with said key combo.
But there is still a difference remaining. I used the old bookmarks as sort of my personal elpher home page. All the gemini-ups would end in the bookmarks file again. TAB would move the cursor to the next link and RET would open said link location. And yes, using eww for http links is brilliant most of the time.
So I think the remaining question is this: what would it take to make elpher accept a local .gmi file just as it was served from gemini://$IP:1965/index.gmi?
With this working I immediately have another use case. I would call gmisub once in the evening and read the resulting index file. No need to install a local server, no need to run gmisub more than once a day.
My emacs-lisp-fu is non-existant. So I rather nicely ask Alex or anyone literate to consider such a feature. I would be ever so grateful!
Cheers,
~ew