Awesome

GemiNaut

A user friendly client to browse Gemini (and Gopher) from Windows.

Gemini is a radically simple protocol and text format for browsing on the Internet. For more information see <a href="https://gemini.circumlunar.space/">https://gemini.circumlunar.space/</a>

UI innovations

GemiNaut has led the way with a number of user interface innovations, some of which are being adopted by other Gemini clients, including:

• User selectable themes
• Site-specific theming
• Page level table of contents
• Visual distinguishing of link protocols by style
• Visual distinguishing of linked file type (e.g. images, documents, music)
• Active footnotes for viewing web content as text/gemini

Download

You can download a pre-built application for Windows from the <a href="https://www.marmaladefoo.com/pages/geminaut">GemiNaut home page</a>

Key features

• Familiar navigation actions, smooth scrolling and text wrap
• Keyboard shortcuts, wheelmouse zoom
• Fast navigation through history, including remembering scroll offset
• Support bullet, heading and quote line styles
• View linked images or download linked files
• Flexible theming engine
• Site based themes
• Visually distinguish internal (gopher, gemini) vs external links (http, https etc)
• Table of contents (Fabric and Dark themes)
• Icon hints to common non textual content (images, audio, video, docs)
• Support both Gemini and Gopher protocol
• Autolinking of urls in Gopher text pages
• View source
• Option to view a simplified rendering of linked web pages
• Client certificates
• Accessible to screen readers

License

GPL 3

Building and development

The GemiNaut solution references and uses the [SmolNetSharp] and SelfCertSharp client library projects, which need to be checked out into a sibiling folder, e.g.

projects\GemiNaut
projects\SmolNetSharp
projects\SelfCertSharp

Screenshots

Fabric theme (site specific themes):

Dark theme:

History

0.8.13, released 23-Jul-2022

• build against .NET 6.0

• allow install on Windows 11

• use updated html2gmi for better web rendering

• minor tweaks to themes so font for web links are more readable due to increased contrast in fabric themes

• remove legacy "Unified" theme

• better support for TLS 1.3

0.8.12, development build

• fewer runtime dependencies for .NET
• fix typo in default bookmark list

0.8.11, released 4-Apr-2021

• new feature: generate and use client certificates
• accessibility feature: hidden links to skip over preformatted text areas for screen readers
• save user settings in persistent folder in profile
• fix: require certificates for proxy servers
• update jdenticon and toast notification libraries
• use SelfCertSharp client certificate library
• report expired server certificates

0.8.9, released 15-Dec-2020

• new internal C# network library (SmolNetSharp) to retrieve Gemini and Gopher resources
• fewer false positives from anti-virus utilities falsely marking GemiNaut and its assets as malware
• use dark scrollbar on dark theme preformatted text areas
• remove dependency on gopher-get and gemget command line utilities
• trim long headings in TOC
• fix bug to allow quotes and angle brackets in labels of preformatted text areas
• better logic detection of redirects combined with input

0.8.8, 7-Oct-2020

Sailing the small web

• application binaries and installer are now signed
• can access the small web (document web) using native converter html->gmi
• default is to try to check certificate validity on all servers, if validation not successful, warn with toast message and connect anyway
• can render text/html files served in gemini (simplified)
• scrollbars on preformatted text areas only appear when region is hovered to reduce clutter
• can access the small web using an HTTP proxy for Gemini (e.g. https://github.com/LukeEmmet/duckling-proxy)
• can access the small web using native converter
• live footnote style links for native converter or if HTTP proxy uses numbered citations (e.g. "[1]")
• integrate Goose to allow for a "simplified" view of web content
• allow switching modes between different rendering options for web content
• update to use latest gemget 1.5
• fix bug to allow downloading from paths having no file extension
• fix bug to correctly render mailto: links
• create application installer
• slighly more whitespace (increased line spacing) in themes to improve readability

0.8.7, 8-Aug-2020

0.8.7

• only show tooltip on preformatted text if non-empty
• drop use of proxy for gopher and allow file downloading
• display images directly from gopher
• use maintained gopher client gopher-get published to https://github.com/LukeEmmet/gopher-get
• resource download possible from cgi script as well as static files
• improve link wrap in gopher using monospace fonts in fabric themes
• file->new to start a new GemiNaut instance with the current URL to fork the browsing session
• can start with a URL commandline parameter
• use same identity in classic fabric theme for /~foo as users/foo
• navigated or redirected URIs are now normalised (e.g. remove port if it is the default for the scheme)
• binary files can now be downloaded to chosen location, not open in proxy (gemini)
• can specify download max size/time before abandoning
• new settings window for download options and home url
• when upgrading from previous version, keep previous settings
• hanging indents for bullets and links in terminal theme
• keyboard shortcuts for bookmarks (e.g. Alt+B) and other menus
• build links correctly when a port is given within the URL
• server size and timeout for slow or too large content
• simple image display within GemiNaut
• updated build of gemget

0.8.6, 6-Jul-2020

GemiNaut 💓 Gopher

• GemiNaut is now a gopher client as well as gemini
• preformatted areas now have their own scroll bar and don't overflow the side of the content
• update Fabric theme so it uses internally generated fabric and identicon (previous Fabric theme still available as "classic")
• automatic linking of plain urls in gopher text files
• automatic generation of page titles for gopher pages based on url
• update to use latest gemget 1.3.0
• theming engine will use same theme for the same user on gemini and gopher
• gopher text is monospaced but will softwrap for longer lines > 85 chars
• only display text/gemini as gemini content, otherwise use plain text preformatted rendering
• make bookmarks window wider
• show tooltips or urls for bookmark entries
• better feedback messages if content cannot be displayed
• check url entered into address bar is valid syntax before trying to navigate to it
• support spacers in bookmarks list with lines of hyphens or underscores longer than two characters
• minor improvements to themes
• use a smaller border around placemarker icon when there is no TOC

0.8.5, 19-Jun-2020

• new dark theme, with variable width font, colours are based on dark themes of source code editors
• bookmarks - source format is just text/gemini
• better vertical spacing - e.g. headings always have space between them and surrounding paragraphs
• user definable themes - create your own and drop it in the GmiConverters/themes folder
• help files now use text/gemini format and have their own table of contents
• minor style improvements for plain theme

0.8.4, 10-Jun-2020

• use correct percent encoding for URL requests with input
• links with encoded query expression now passed on to server correctly
• support quotation line style (new addition to Gemini spec)
• show an icon on links to probable images (png, jpg etc) as a visual hint
• asterisks must be followed by space to become a bullet (Gemini spec update)
• remove debug white border around navigation in Fabric theme
• minor style updates
• bug fix: don't remove commas and separators from text lines

0.8.3, 29-May-2020

• add automatic page level table of contents for Fabric theme

0.8.2, 28-May-2020

• fix keyboard focus problem so you dont have to click into browser on each page
• display view->source GMI as utf-8

0.8.1, 27-May-2020

First public release

• added simple userguide
• infer the document title from the first heading or para text line and show in window caption
• darken the background a tiny bit in Fabric theme to be less saturated
• workaround for GemGet bug which overwrites into the output file, rather than replacing the whole file
• user selectable themes (4 to start with Fabric, Plain, Terminal and Unified UI)
• html escape source content before display
• pass torture tests relating to link formation
• detect response redirect urls and adjust links accordingly (e.g. gemini://domain/users/user -> gemini://domain/users/user/)
• pad output with blank lines at end for better display of short content
• new plain line blocks always preceded by at least one blank line
• prettify spacing of headings, always have a blank line before these.
• prettify spacing of links/bullets, always have a blank line unless previous element was one too (e.g. gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space:1965/users/acdw/ is laid out more pleasantly)
• when loading raw gmi for view source get browser to interpret as text/plain
• application icon from http://www.iconarchive.com/show/pretty-office-8-icons-by-custom-icon-design/Text-align-left-icon.html
• txtUrl follows page better
• local versions of Rebol and GmiConverters and Gemget folders used if found
• more pretty handling of page not found (status 51)
• txtUrl never shows https urls
• user can edit home page
• show prompt for query building
• decorate links to expected binary files with document glyph to hint content
• hanging indent on bullets and links
• visual hinting of non gemini links with glyph and link style
• show tooltip of url to be navigated to
• code fences for preformatted areas, including label as tooltip
• toast popups for error conditions
• session and server independent identikons and page background texture
• user based visual identity/theme for personal sub-sites, not requiring author control
• view source
• launch external urls in system browser
• use http proxy for common binary file types
• empty cache on close
• prettify links, headings and bullets

Intrinsic features in virture of using a web browser

• go back and forward remembers scroll offset
• rich CSS styling and visual design
• smooth scrolling
• tab through page links
• cursor keys, page/up down, keyboard shortcuts for back/forwards
• zoom with wheelmouse
• navigate forwards, back, quickly (browser cache)
• wrap long lines to window
• Ctrl+F to find in current page
• Select all, copy to clipboard
• Ctrl+P to print page