Lagrange Pre-Release – A Gemini client that also supports Gopher and Finger | Hacker News Reader

Lagrange Pre-Release – A Gemini client that also supports Gopher and Finger

skyjake.github.io

117 pointsrguiscard30 comments

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So for the uninitiated like myself,

this is hosted on Github at:

https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange

And is a client for a new internet protocol that is "heavier than Gopher, but lighter than the web". Discussed here:

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

I'd grab this from the official git host rather than github: https://git.skyjake.fi/gemini/lagrange/releases

I've had trouble getting the git subprojects to work when downloading from github

Looking at the list of gemini pages here https://gemini.circumlunar.space/, I'm reminded of the 90s where interlinked sites actually seems like the most sensible way to get around. This stuff isn't going to be found on Google.

Gemini already has several search engines[1] and aggregators[2].

[1] gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/ [2] gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

I built Kennedy and it was a delight to see it mentioned here. Thank you

I particularly like Gemini as a hacker. Currently it is roughly the size of the WWW in 1993. This makes it a lot of fun for making crawlers, full text search with stemming, building simple services like weather forecasts, etc. it’s big enough to be fun and small enough that I don’t have to provide something as large and amazing as marginalia’s work

and social media [3] gemini://station.martinrue.com/

There's also gemini://geminispace.info

Lagrange is really good, works on many platforms and supports all three "small internet" protocols (Gemini, Gopher, Finger).

Another browser that I use and that is able to access those same protocols is Kristall, it's very basic and simple to use, (whereas Lagrange is more feature-rich) https://kristall.random-projects.net/

Lagrange is by far the best gemini client I've used. The gemini experience on Android has been a bit lacking, useable but not very polished, I'm very happy to see this particular client ported to Android.

I love the gemini protocol. The spec is often quite easy to read, writing at least the fundamental things of a browser like the rendering (With a bit of cheating using GtkLabel and Pango markup) took less than a week. Only things like certificates were awful and I never got them entirely to work

Fantastic! I love Lagrange on the desktop, and while Deedum is a perfectly serviceable Android client, I'll be happy to have a uniform experience.

I love Gemini. It's very cosy. Note that Lagrange does non-native UI rendering, and though that's bad for a11y the result is very nice. Everything renders quickly and looks nice, though some minor things feel a little iOSey on the Android port.

Lagrange is the best Gemini client out there, although to be fair I still don’t think Gemini is as good an idea as it’s staunchest proponents do (no content-length in replies, puritanical markup, etc.).

IMO HTTP 1.1 is fine if you get rid of HTML (or restrict it to an older standard.)

There's no way to make that clear so people built a new protocol.

I went through the QR Code step to add the repository to F-Droid but can't find Lagrange to install. What am I doing wrong?

I had some difficulty with this as well, but [1] had the answer: after toggling the repo on, swipe down so that fdroid force-refreshes the repo list.

https://forum.f-droid.org/t/how-to-enable-repos/5722

No luck. Tried that as well. Toggled on/off the repository a couple of times and force refreshed F-Droid list.

I'll try it out some other day when, hopefully, it shows up.

It's a really bloated browser, barely working on my 11 year old core 2 duo.

However, it's way the best geminibrowser there is! It's beautiful and well built. I'm using it everyday on my macbook air m1.

This is no toy like many other gemini things. This is awesome

Even Chrome works perfectly on my 11 year old core 2 duo. The idea of a Gopher browser being more bloated than a modern mainstream HTML browser sounds mind-boggling.

I guess it depends on your references. Chrome is horrible slow on my c2d. It runs fine though. Lagrange is of course much faster than chrome, but it's still noticeable slower than I expect.

- Use Chromium

- Add Ublock Origin

- git clone git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters, copy the file for chrome as /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh and chmod +x it.

Is finger the old Unix command or something else here?

The former (RFC 1288).

I'm excited to see this, since I use Lagrange on desktop and love it. The prerelease version looks good.

Can Gemini be served over IPFS?

Documents in gemtext format (text/gemini MIME-type) can be served over any protocol, but Gemini and IPFS are both protocols and you wouldn’t nest one inside the other.

I use this and it's amazing! Starts up so much and looks so good.

Finally a protocol for the Emacs Operating System

Yep: https://thelambdalab.xyz/elpher/

And Emacs already has a good Gemini and Gopher browser, called Elpher.

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