💾 Archived View for lark.gay › posts › lagrange-review.gmi captured on 2024-08-24 at 23:31:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-02-05)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I feel bad posting about Gemini so much these past few days, but it is kinda my current special interest, so here goes.
Lagrange is the Gemini client I'm using right now. I've also tried Amfora. Here are my first impressions after about a week of using them, and some thoughts on how they compare to Chromium.
With Chromium becoming an increasingly user-hostile piece of software—with FLoC and the Topics API and WEI and everything else Google has abused their browser monopoly to try and implement—Gemini has been a welcome reprieve. I know web browsers and Gemini/Gopher clients are far from the same thing, but they share commonalities in that they both implement a "browser" experience, and I think it's worth comparing their respective UX.
Both Lagrange and Amfora treat keyboard navigation as a first-class feature. I enjoy the vim-style navigation in Amfora, and I appreciate that Lagrange is easy to configure to work similarly. Navigating to links via the home row is a killer feature; I wish you didn't need a browser extension to get the same functionality in Chromium (I've used Vimium in the past for this).
The "Identities" menu in Lagrange is a really cool abstraction over Gemini's use of TLS client certificates. I think this is a testament to Gemini as much as it is to Lagrange, but it's a really slick experience to be able to create and switch between identities so easily. No login flows or password managers or session timeouts. It feels like the kind of experience we're only just starting to get on the web with passkeys.
Feed readers are the kind of feature I'm frustrated modern web browsers don't implement. It's actually shocking how few good options there seem to be for (especially mobile-friendly) feed readers. I like being able to choose which news sources I follow instead of whatever The Algorithm has decided will best monopolize my attentionÂą. I love that Atom/RSS/gemsub feeds are such a core part of gemspace, and I appreciate that these Gemini clients have feed readers built-in.
Lagrange has a feature that deterministically randomizes the style sheet for each capsule you visit, using the domain as a seed. It even gives them little favicons! It makes it easier to remember which capsule you're on and tell them apart in your feed, and it also makes gemspace feel a little more cozy by giving each capsule some distinct visual flair, like you would get on the web. It feels like the best of both worlds. You can also override the theming for a given domain, which makes me wish you got that kind of client-side theming support on the web.
My only complaint here is that I wish you could toggle this feature off (at least I haven't discovered how to yet). Sometimes I do want a consistent reading experience across capsules, like you would get in the reader mode in your web browser.
One feature of Lagrange I love is being able to populate your local bookmarks from a remote page. I see other geminauts maintaining a list of links on their capsule so they have a way of keeping bookmarks in sync between clients. It's nice that Lagrange supports this workflow, so you can see those bookmarks in the sidebar and get search results for those bookmarks in the search bar. It feels like a very smallweb alternative to implementing Chromium-style device syncing.
I do wish this feature would preserve the heading structure on your gemtext page and replicate it as folders in your client bookmarks, though. Lagrange already supports this when *importing* bookmarks from a page, but doesn't seem to when *synchronizing* bookmarks from a page.
Also, Lagrange works on mobile! And it works fairly well! That surprised the heck out of me, to get a full-featured mobile Gemini browser. My only complaint about that experience is that the bookmarks bar is still horizontal across the screen, which doesn't work very well in portrait orientation. I wish it worked more like mobile web browsers where there's a separate page with cards for each tab.
Lagrange is a remarkably full-featured browser given it's for an esoteric protocol very few people use. And it has some nice features I was pleasantly surprised to discover! I'm used to corporate software where there seems to be a disconnect between the features the developers implement and the features users want.
It's cool how much software there is for this protocol in general. I'm excited to discover what else people have created.
[1]: The thing that made me finally quit algorithmic news apps was when The Algorithm discovered I'm trans. Reading what the news media has to report about trans folks was not good for my health.
─────────