Gemini is a neat piece of technology. The Gemini protocol somewhat comparable to HTTP and the Gemtext file format comparable to HTML. But it’s simple. Like so simple that writing a client or server is actually doable.
All popular web browsers (Chromium and its skins - and Firefox) have their roots in the 1990’s and there hasn’t been any new web browser becoming usable in many years. Not because people haven’t tried - I’m sure many people have - but because the standards around the modern web are so gigantic that it’s just not feasable to develop a web browser from scratch.
The best (and only?) attempt I’ve seen is Ladybird, which is “an ongoing project to build a truly independent web browser from scratch”. And I’m very happy to see this project continuing to get better, but it’s still far from a usable web browser for everything you want to do in life.
So, back to Gemini!
Earlier in 2024 I’ve installed a Gemini server on the same host which is running Apache2 for serving my website/blog and after a few commands for setup it was running.
Since my website content is written in Markdown and built using Hugo, it was not a difficult exercise to add “Gemtext generation” to the build pipeline and using a few regex replacements we can generate a version of the website that mostly resembles Gemtext.
Of course, that generated version is definitely not perfect and sometimes some Markdown-isms or HTML bits slip through, but for being essentially zero maintenance it’s pretty great. Manually polishing a separate Gemtext version would be better of course but for now this version will do.
For viewing Gemini pages you can find clients for most platforms, notably I like “Lagrange” on Linux and “Buran” on Android. Of course there’s plenty other clients as well, including clients for your terminal and everything else.
Hope you enjoy!
