Gophie – modern gopher client for Windows, Mac, Linux | Hacker News Reader

Gophie – modern gopher client for Windows, Mac, Linux

gophie.org

197 pointsnateb202256 comments

Worth mentioning: the German daily "taz", one of the bigger newspapers (green/liberal/left leaning), offers to this day a full text Gopher site: gopher://taz.de, even as onion service gopher://ibpj4qv7mufde33w.onion

A good article on gopher in 2021:

https://hackaday.com/2021/09/28/gopher-the-competing-standar...

a starting point is gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70

Not _that_ related, but why does everyone use monospace in these types of programs? I get that it looks nice, but you can re-produce the general look in a proportional font that's infinitely easier on the eyes.

Lagrange, a Gemini browser rather than a Gopher client, has decent typography.

I do wish non-TUI Gopher clients would at least experiment with proportional typefaces, though.

A lot of gophermaps and files served on gopher have ASCII art headers that expect fixed-width text.

That's fair. It would've been nice to have syntax for fixed-width blocks.

I typically use gopherus[0]. Besides unixlikes, it works on DOS (I use it with FreeDOS), and has very low requirements (I believe it works on 8086 PCs).

0. http://gopherus.sourceforge.net/

Running the Java version quite smoothly in OpenBSD 7.1. Nice!

The name reminds me of the old Anarchie FTP search client :) Probably not the intention, but similar era.

This is bringing back quite some nostalgia - the internet used to be so much different!

Gophie is neat but I am hooked on Elpher.

My favorite websites are gopheresque

I spent a lot of time on gopher growing up (thanks SCN.org & my public library) but I still preferred simple-style websites then and do now...for some weird reason. I do find that I like at least a tiny bit of metaphor in some visual way. Could be a single tiny .gif icon even.

Gopher's still pretty fun, just a bit of an interest stacking order.

There is no real connection between the two but Gopher always makes me think of OS/2 since it was the platform I used Gopher on. There was a free PM Gopher client available which was written by an IBM employee on their own time.

It makes me think of VMS/VAX because I ran a gopher server on a VAX

That's pretty cool. OS/2 needed more of those things, special software benefits of using the OS. It was such a promising platform...I remember being kind of sad to move along.

Linux started really getting popular during OS/2's waning days but I'm not sure if OS/2 people really migrated or wanted to migrate in that direction.

I suspect not too many did. Most probably switched to Windows 9x on the desktop with Windows NT being the next most common choice. On the server side most of my customers used OS/2 for running Communications Server or LAN Server. These were replaced by Windows NT and Windows NT running SNA Server. SNA Server was one of the worst products I have ever had the misfortune to have to support.

I migrated from OS/2 directly to linux.

OS/2 Warp was a work of art...

Is there a reason why gopher is seeing a resurgence in the tech sphere?

Honest question, if you like it I'm not trying to put you down, but I just don't see how it's any better or worse than HTTP

> Is there a reason why gopher is seeing a resurgence in the tech sphere?

I think it's largely a demonstrative reaction against the appification of the web, built upon gopher’s more limited interface which is more heavily optimized to a read-only hypertext use case, which fits a lot of people's nostalgic idealization of the early web.

> Is there a reason why gopher is seeing a resurgence in the tech sphere?

I think it's largely a demonstrative reaction against the commercialization of the web, built upon gopher’s more limited interface which is more heavily optimized to a read-only hypertext use case, which fits a lot of people's nostalgic idealization of the early web

If you'd like to know how it's worse...

A gopher URL looks like: gopher://host/Xfile

Where X isn't part of the path name, it's one-character file type code. This code is client-side only and determine how the client downloads and interprets the file. Gopher has 2 separate ways of sending files - Binary files are sent as-is. Text/Menu files are sent line-oriented, with a CRLF after each line and a trailing . CR LF at the end. Again, the type code is on the client side and is not sent to the server.

It's uncomfortable not just to read this, but also to be reminded of so many weird protocols and schemes from way back when.

It brings to mind a box where I used to work, full of forgotten hardware that never really caught on. It was fun to check it out in some ways, but when discussing the pain points there was usually an audible groan from someone nearby.

As enthusiastic as I get about 'vintage' tech, it's sobering to hear someone note the bumpy road that led us to the slick technologies we take for granted today.

It sounds like you have some interesting stories to tell. Can you give an example of something that sticks out in your memory?

For me the most annoying side-effect of this is that there's no way to signify an error in the server response, or even have errors rendered sensibly. Many servers just send errors in gophermap form (type 1), which can wind up being rendered as plain text or interpreted as binary data by the client, depending on the URL.

The one advantage to this approach is that you can always convince a client to show you the source of gopher://host/1index by requesting gopher://host/0index.

>Is there a reason why gopher is seeing a resurgence in the tech sphere?

It's free from monstrous JS frameworks. More information, less apps.

> It's free from monstrous JS frameworks. More information, less apps.

100%. The craptastic-ness of the modern JS web is driving a broader resurgence in things you might call "indie web" or "retro web". In addition to gopher, the Gemini protocol seems to be gaining traction and has a fairly active community.

This has me thinking of how stovepiped Javascript + HTML + CSS apps are. Sure, you can do anything, but there are some things that are just easy. The current web feels like a progression of a few people figuring out a new trick, and then everyone adopting it at the same time.

I wonder what the web would have looked like if the web had been more like Hypercard. I think back to high school, with some students delivering their history projects as multimedia hypercard stacks on floppy disk. Weird times those were. And for as weird and unique as Geocities websites were, they all fit the page model.

The web feels like it's never been fully unconstrained in the way that something like Hypercard or Squeak were. We moved a lot of the analog world to the digital world in a hurry. At the start of it all, there was intense skepticism about the digital replacements for analog things because the digital thing more often than not sucked by comparison. I think Hypercard is evidence of a time when computer companies felt they were competing with a richer set of analog alternatives.

There's a resurgence in general against the "bloated web" where a chunk of people move back towards primarily text-based sharing of information and simplicity.

This drive is expressed in many different ways both in the frontend and backend. In a way, static site generators were a reaction to complex CMS systems. Another expression is people going back to retro design using only basic features provided by HTML / CSS with minimal (audio)visual cues. Or even just publishing text.

Then there's people who feel that even HTTP and HTML are bloated themselves, and move away wholesale from the Web towards a parallel world which has been coined by some as "smolweb" or "dorkweb"

see: https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol...

A major catalyst is the Gemini protocol which emerged a few short years ago and gained some popularity. In the wake of that, people re-discovered the Gopher protocol as well.

I think these communities are niches driven by similar motivations as, say, aficionados of BBS systems or ham radio. That is, the aspect of tinkering, being in control and not being hampered by complexity and inherent restrictions. Plus the ability to create an independent community of like-minded souls. And, sure enough, a sense of nostalgia as well.

One could note the quaintness associated with this resurgence, but it's tied into a philosophical debate regarding online freedom and privacy as well. Unlike the Web, these protocols lack all kinds of affordances making it far harder (but not impossible) to track people across the Gopherverse or the Gemini space.

Sometimes, you just go online because you want to read about something. These days, it feels that most place on the web are designed to, well, do most anything other than let you have what you want to read without at the very least distracting the crap out of you, and often tracking you all over the place and suggesting that you read (or more often, WATCH) these other things that aren't actually what you asked for, and would you look at the time...

It's a lot like how some people read books sometimes even though movies are available.

Off topic: can any suggest the easiest way to run a USENET/NNTP server (open source preferred)? I've Googled a bunch but cannot find a decent solution.

https://www.leafnode.org/ is decent if you just need a small instance. https://james.apache.org/ for more entreprisey stuff. And the old but reliable https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/

If on Windows, Hamster is easiest and most powerful: http://www.elfden.co.uk/hamster/conf.htm

Most web sites about it are in German, but the program itself has English language UI, as well.

There is also the derivative Hamster Next, which does proper server-to-server peering.

If NNTP is not your primary goal, public-inbox[1] will serve mailing list archives over NNTP (among other access methods).

[1]: https://public-inbox.org/README.html

Seems like you got the easiest ways already, but perhaps the most fun way is through the Synchronet BBS system, which will run on Windows, Linux, or *BSD (not sure if this includes OS X...probably, with effort). It's primary purpose of course is to host an ANSI BBS, but it includes services for a web interface to the message base, as well as NNTP, gopher, ftp...heck, even POP/SMTP if you really wanna go nuts. And it'll interface just fine with the old Door games too through something like dosemu.

https://synchro.net/

And here I am just waiting for the revival of Hyper-G :-D

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220349551_The_Hyper...

any interesting gopher site to visit?

Seriously.

Why one? Veronica lists a hundred or two - one can choose among them after checking them all, I guess?

These are some public Gopher servers but not sure which ones are notable/ interesting: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=gopher+port%3A70

Steven Frank, cofounder of Panic Inc., keeps his blog exclusively on gopher: gopher://stevenf.com:70/1. (He there links out to other gopher sites that may be of interest.)

Twitter users had fun trying to figure out wtf to do with that:

https://twitter.com/playdate/status/1520144706511904768

SDF has a pretty comprehensive site, hosting tons of stuff: gopher://sdf.org

Codevoid: gopher://codevoid.de

Quux: gopher://gopher.quux.org

Some of the aggregators that I like:

Floodgap - generalist gopher portal with lots of links - gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/

Cosmic voyage: collective writing experiment - gopher://cosmic.voyage

Bongusta - phlogs aggregator & community - gopher://i-logout.cz:70/1/bongusta/

SDF - phlogs aggregator & community - gopher://sdf.org

Tildeverse: aggregator for tilde communities - gopher://tildeverse.org

Gopherpedia: reading Wikipedia through Gopher because why not - gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/1/

I would add gopher://magical.fish among those. And gopher://1436.ninja, maybe.

A video game wiki I use sometimes:

gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/

Games you can play on Gopher:

gopher://worldofsolitaire.com/

gopher://GiantGopher.com:70/--/Winnifred_Huck

There was another HN Gopher thread recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31392145#31410764

I'm cobbling a gopher site for a book of metaphysics. It doesn't work for clients yet, but I have the gopher server in replit here: https://replit.com/@agamus/metaphysikos?v=1

gopher://magical.fish

gopher://sdf.org

gopher://mozz.us

gopher://bitreich.org

gopher://hngopher.com (heh).

It looks and pretty and modern, but what does this client do that Lynx doesn't?

"The application requires a Java Runtime Environment 8".

Is there a reason for that, aren't current Java versions compatible?

I've also seen that with Freeplane, and it's always a stumbling block.

There is not even a JRE anymore. I guess they just don’t want to ship separate exe files to different platforms, but to answer your question, a modern JDK should work just fine.

The weird thing is that the code looks like it was written without an IDE! At the very least, IDEs hate the '*' imports, yet there's plenty.

Things like that are easily configured

Hm. TIL that Idea has a setting for this. Never really looked for one before.

> Gophie is written in plain Java for anyone and any system

It’s a shame it wasn’t written in Go for maximum confusion

Should have written it in rust and posted it to r/golang

Added some commits to my gopher/gemini client written in rust an hour ago: https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher

Actually a Gopher client written in Go seems like a natural fit - a quick search finds this one: https://tildegit.org/sloum/Bombadillo - with TUI and vim keybindings for maximum nostalgia...

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