💾 Archived View for gemlog.blue › users › sloum › 1594184706.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 18:47:09. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-09-24)
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I had posted recently about trying to get a GUI based gemini client running on my wife's system. I tried again with Kristall and did get it isntalled. She is running an older MacBook Air with an oldish version of OSX. My first thing was figuring out how to get qmake on the system (spoiler: `brew install qt`). Once I got that I found out that qt was using an older build than kristall wanted, but it was just a warning so I proceeded anyway. I then found out that `std::optional`, the c++ lib, is not present on her system. Changing it to `std::experimental::optional` at all reference points as well as changing `std::nullopt` to `std::experimental::nullopt` got it to finally build.
So she has a usable browser... though it has issues. It does not appear like the screenshots and has HUGE borders/padding around all UI elements. So that is a bummer but not a huge deal. No dialog boxes allow me to press yes/ok/accept/save. I can hit enter and the default action will take place... but that is it. For preferences the default action seems to update the preferences to whatever I set them as, so that is good. I was able to jack up the font size (my wife's vision is not great). However, I am unable to delete bookmarks. It just cancels if I hit enter and a mouse click on `yes` (to confirm the deletion) has no effect at all. This isnt a huge deal and I think Kristall is still the best option for her at the moment, but it is a mild bummer. I would submit some of these as issues, but I am clearly outside of the intended build target (plus I do not want to use github).
I really liked the visual customizability of Kristall, but some things were weird: gophermaps render kind of funky. You can choose icons or text to display the gophertype of each line. The icons were black... but we were using a dark background, so they were not really visible. So I tried text... but the text is variable width (ie. "directory" vs "text") which causes really ugly spacing weirdness and things that should align on a gophermap do not.
The last weird thing was that the protocol of links in text/gemini documents were shown in brackets after the link. This is not something that the author of the document added, the client does this. I dont care for this. I already mark cross-protocol links so it ends up being redundant... but there is no way to turn it off and so it seems like it is something the content authors added. It is even in the same font/color. It might be a little better if the font size/face/color changed to show that it was different in nature than the surrounding text (or just have a toggle to turn it on/off and default to off).
I know that sounds like I had a bad experience but I really didnt. I am not the target audience for a graphical client at all... but as far as using the mouse to do things goes it was a pretty good experience that was quite customizable. The weirdness of this particular isntall notwithstanding, it seems like a great gemini client choice for those wanting a decent graphical experience.