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Gophersnake

Gophersnake is a stand-alone Gopher client for modern desktops, written in Python and TkInter. As of November 2018, development has mostly stalled at an early stage, apart from contributed enhancements.

Wait, what's Gopher?

To oversimplify, Gopher was a precursor of the Web, that fell by the wayside for various reasons. Nowadays considered obsolete, it's kept alive by a handful of fans, not just out of nostalgia but also its genuine qualities.

Gopher is much simpler than the Web. It uses less bandwidth, processing power and screen space. It's still largely text-based, so you won't have to deal with annoying ads (or any kind of script for that matter). Gopher is limited, but what it can do, it does quickly, cleanly and with no fuss. And Gophersnake can introduce you to this world.

Why, man? Why?!

Because the Internet is turning into a web-based monoculture, and every monoculture is a disaster waiting to happen.

Install and run

Just download `gophersnake.py`, it's a self-contained script. To run it, you need Python and Tkinter. Both should be installed by default on Linux and Mac; for Windows, just download an official installer from python.org.

Click on links to see where they lead; double-click to navigate. The up/down/enter keys work as well. In the text viewer, Ctrl-A selects the whole text, and Ctrl-C copies it to the clipboard.

Gophersnake is being developed on Python 3. For now it's still compatible with 2.7, but that could change at any time.

Features

Known bugs

To do

Similar software

Suck-O-Rama, a minimal client

Burrow: a more advanced client