Project Gemini - Caster
Project Gemini is a new protocol trying to fit in-between Gopher and HTTP. Checkout the spec and FAQ for more details. I found a gemini client, called caster, which is written in rust and uses GTK to display the ‘cap’ (cap==webpage). There are other clients, however, they are heavily based on Gopher ergo commandline based.
This are some of the packages I needed to install to be able to complete caster on Fedora 32, there were probably others, but I’m sure you can figure it out - if not ping me.
sudo dnf install cairo-gobject-devel openssl-devel pango-devel atk-devel gdk-pixbuf2-devel gtk3-devel
I kept getting an error saying it can’t link, turned out to be an error with OpenSSL. Now, I know I have the development headers installed, yet, it would not work. Finally, I figured it out, the crate, native-tls aka openssl, did not like (needed an older version) the version Fedora had. So after some trial and error, I told rust to use a vendored version of SSL.
diff --git a/Cargo.toml b/Cargo.toml
index 99a1492..e72f8b1 100644
--- a/Cargo.toml
+++ b/Cargo.toml
@@ -15,7 +15,6 @@ glib-sys = "*"
pango = "*"
open = "*"
regex = "*"
-native-tls = "*"
openssl = "*"
url = "*"
tempfile = "*"
@@ -29,4 +28,8 @@ serde_derive="*"
[dependencies.gtk]
version = "0.8.0"
-features = ["v3_22"]
\ No newline at end of file
+features = ["v3_22"]
+
+[dependencies.native-tls]
+version = "*"
+features = ["vendored"]
Once it was working I decided to spice it up a bit with some colouring.
~/.config/caster/settings.toml
[general]
start_url = "gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom"
[colors]
h1 = "#272635"
h2 = "#6C8694"
h3 = "#8FB6C3"
list = "#272635"
text = "#272635"
background = "#E8E9F3"
[characters]
h1 = "│ "
h2 = "║ "
h3 = "║│ "
list = "▢"
[monospace]
gemini=false
gopher=true
finger=true
Which makes it look a bit like this:
Project Gemini has some nice ideas, and an active community. I’d love for hugo (site generator) to include Gemini as an output option. Moreover, the Caster (browser?) is functional, but provides only a slight upgrade from traditional commandline interfaces, perhaps this is intentional, or not. Either way, I plan to have a poke around the code, and will be keeping an eye out for any ‘quick wins’. The first being a ‘reading mode’ and tabs.