Offpunk 3.0

I didn't really get what "a command-line Web, Gemini, and Gopher browser that allows you to work offline" meant, like how is it offline? So I think this is the bit of info I was missing:

Every content you visit is cached and can be visited later while offline. If you try to visit a content not available in your cache, it will be marked to be downloaded later. Offpunk allows you to synchronise you computer once every hour, day or week and work offline without being interrupted.

(from: https://offpunk.net/whatisoffpunk.html)

So its kindof designed to be offline with occasional sync. Interesting.

I was curious, so I tried it out.

I ran `apt install offpunk` on my Debian laptop.

Then, I ran "offpunk" and got a new terminal prefixed "ON>".

Curious, I entered "help" and got a list of topics. A few stood out as immediately interesting, so I tried "open https://benovermyer.com" to open my site. It said I needed to "go" somewhere first. So, I tried "go https://benovermyer.com" instead.

That showed me a text preview of my front page, interestingly with content between headers stripped out. OK, that's neat, but now what?

So I now tried "open", and this time it opened the page in my browser, Vivaldi. It was my site, sure enough, but cached locally and missing my main image. All the CSS was intact, though.

That's as far as I've gotten at this point, but it was an interesting enough experience that I thought I would share. It's a very different flow from what I was expecting.

> Something wonderful happened on the road leading to 3.0: Offpunk became a true cooperative effort. Offpunk 3.0 is probably the first release that contains code I didn’t review line-by-line.

I felt true dread reading a sentence like this. I had to reread to make sure the author means there are other trusted contributors now.

As it is often the case these days, some projects are quite proud of announcing that no human has written or reviewed their code.

This looks interesting! I wanted to find more info about the Gemini protocol, and it's annoying how un-searchable it is now due to Google Gemini.

This is really interesting, is there a way to provide downloadable caches for websites where that would be legal? I could Imagine just pre-downloading wikipedia, stack overflow, all kinds of documentation, etc. In a compressed and preorganized format instead of scraping it every time.

OFFPUNK sounds like a good name for a punk-like movement to rebel against the entire internet and live offline.

I wonder when contemporary developers will (re)invent Emacs/Gnus: the unified inbox for email, feeds, and news, because what really matters are text messages + eventual multimedia content, personal and private scoring to manage them, and a consistent local UI that allows for personal archiving and resharing.

I've looked at the Fediverse, objectively with little hope and many design issues, I'm watching Nostr with interest even though it seems more like a rough sketch lacking the ideas to move forward, but that concept of Gnus and Usenet, so simple in itself, still hasn't managed to resurface.

There should ve a variable to choose your inline image reader, between chafa, timg, some wrapper around w3mimgdisplay...

Harcoding it it's bad.