!http clients
Before the world wide web, there was Gopher. But then HTTP took over and Gopher all but died. It’s made a bit of a comeback and has a spiritual successor in another protocol, Gemini. Let’s install some clients.
Lagrange is a GUI client for Gopher and Gemini. They provide binary releases, so it’s a bit easier to get started with.
Head over to the GitHub releases page: https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange/releases
They also have an experimental Android client: https://skyjake.github.io/fdroid/repo/
ncgopher is a text-only browser written in Rust. It supports both Gopher and Gemini.
On Debian 11, you should be able to build it using this:
sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config libssl-dev libncurses-dev libsqlite3-dev git
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source $HOME/.cargo/env
mkdir src
cd src
git clone https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher.git
cd ncgopher
cargo build
I may have missed some dependencies, but that should get you most of the way there.
The venerable text-mode browser Lynx also support Gopher. Lynx should be available in pretty much every package manager on every platform.
Kristall seems to be a little stale, but is worth mentioning.
A Debian 11 build should look something like this:
sudo apt install qt5-qmake qttools5-dev-tools qtmultimedia5-dev libqt5svg5-dev libssl-dev make g++ git
mkdir src
cd src
git clone https://github.com/MasterQ32/kristall.git
cd kristall
mkdir build
cd build
qmake ../src/kristall.pro
make