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Comment by zafiro17 | Hacker News Reader

If text-based access to popular websites is your cup of tea, there are two very good gopher interfaces I use regularly: gopher://gopherpedia.com for Wikipedia and gopher://gopherddit.com for Reddit.

The latter is not very helpful on image-based threads but is excellent for text-rich threads (like askreddit). The gopher interface to wikipedia is surprisingly full-featured; I love it.

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Trying gopher://gopherpedia.com with a page linked on HN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_cat

Any ideas why it's missing the first paragraph? I didn't spot a page revision without it.

Looks like the first paragraph was a recent edit. I'm not sure how gopherpedia works but perhaps it only syncs periodically.

That was my thinking too but I can't find a revision without it on the first page of results going back to 2019. Why does it look like a recent edit to you?

I don't have time to look too closely into it, but my guess is that it's a bug somewhere in the parser: https://github.com/muffinista/gopherpedia.com/blob/main/pars...

The markup behind that article isn't terribly complicated, but the parser isn't perfect either. For example: https://gopherpedia.com/gopherpedia.com/Gustave_Dore has some glitches in the lead sentence.

My suspicion was that it's getting confused by the line above the intro, but I pasted the article's source code into Wikipedia:Sandbox and gopherpedia read the intro just fine. Strange!

Aha! Here we go. Compare:

- https://gopherpedia.com/gopherpedia.com/Belling_the_Cat

- https://gopherpedia.com/gopherpedia.com/Belling%20the%20Cat

Without underscores in the URL, the first paragraph disappears. Bizarre.

Is there a gopher client for macOS? I haven't been able to find one. Command-line is preferred, but beggars can't be choosers.

`lynx` still works for me.

Oh, wow. I didn't know that Lynx does gopher:// URLs. Thanks!

I see MacPorts includes the following clients (I took the liberty of removing servers and proxies from this list):

    $ port search gopher
    bombadillo @2.3.3_2 (net)
        Bombabillo is a non-web client for the terminal, supporting Gopher, Gemini and much more.

    kristall-devel @20211120 (net)
        Small-Internet Browser for Gemini, Gopher, Finger & HTTP

    phetch @1.1.0 (net)
        A terminal client designed to help you quickly navigate the gophersphere.

    vf-1 @0.0.11_1 (net, python)
        command-line gopher client

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