gophed: burrowing the gopherspace with ed

gophed is a simple gopher client in a POSIX shell script. gophed uses ed(1) as a pager and navigator, and is based on an original idea of an ed-based client by Solene Rapenne (gopher://bitreich.org/1/usr/solene/).

gophed is distributed under the MIT License. A copy of the LICENSE is available in the repo.

The first time you run gophed you need to initialise it via:

./gophed -i

This will create a few symlinks in the current folder, namely g, v, and d, which will be used as gophed commands. Once gophed has been initialised, you can start visiting some gopherholes:

./gophed / kalos.mine.nu 70

or equivalently:

./v / kalos.mine.nu 70

This command will download the corresponding resource, and print it on output with line numbers. An excerpt is reported below:

...
15      i+------------------------------------------+   Err     kalos.mine.nu   70
16      i    Welcome to kalos.mine.nu Gopher-hole       Err     kalos.mine.nu   70
17      i+------------------------------------------+   Err     kalos.mine.nu   70
18      0 About me      /me.txt kalos.mine.nu   70
19      0 About this gopherhole /about.txt      kalos.mine.nu   70
20      1 Contacts      /contacts       kalos.mine.nu   70
21      i                       Err     kalos.mine.nu   70
22      1 My gopherhole @SDF    /users/katolaz  sdf.org 70
23      1 My gopherhole @republic.circumlunar.space     /~katolaz/      republic.circumlunar.space      70
24      1 My Phlog @republic.circumlunar.space  /~katolaz/phlog republic.circumlunar.space      70
25      i+------------------------------------------+   Err     kalos.mine.nu   70
26      i                  Projects                     Err     kalos.mine.nu   70
27      i+------------------------------------------+   Err     kalos.mine.nu   70
28      1 Burrow the Burrows (crawling the Gopherspace) /burrow/index.gph       kalos.mine.nu   70
29      1 gosher -- a Gopher server in a shell script   /software/gosher        kalos.mine.nu   70
...
=

The final "=" is the gophed default prompt. No need to say that you can change the default prompt to any single character by changing the PROMPT variable. Now, if you want to visit the selector at line 23, you would type:

!./g % 24 [ENTER]

at the prompt. This will effectively spawn another gophed instance, telling it to get the selector at line 23 in the current document, and to load the corresponding resource. In this case we will have something like:

1       i    ________            ____                                           Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
2       i   /_  __/ /_  ___     / __ \_      ______ _______   _____  ____       Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
3       i    / / / __ \/ _ \   / / / / | /| / / __ `/ ___/ | / / _ \/ __ \      Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
4       i   / / / / / /  __/  / /_/ /| |/ |/ / /_/ / /   | |/ /  __/ / / /      Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
5       i  /_/ /_/ /_/\___/  /_____/ |__/|__/\__,_/_/    |___/\___/_/ /_/       Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
6       i       Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
7       i         ____  __           __                  _ __  __       Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
8       i        / __ )/ /___ ______/ /___________ ___  (_) /_/ /_      Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
9       i       / __  / / __ `/ ___/ //_/ ___/ __ `__ \/ / __/ __ \     Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
10      i      / /_/ / / /_/ / /__/ ,< (__  ) / / / / / / /_/ / / /     Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
11      i     /_____/_/\__,_/\___/_/|_/____/_/ /_/ /_/_/\__/_/ /_/      Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
12      i       Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
13      i+------------------------------------------------------------------+   Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
14      i   "their swords were forged by dwarves, in the mists of time..."      Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
15      i+------------------------------------------------------------------+   Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
16      i       Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
17      0 About this phlog      /~katolaz/phlog/about.txt       republic.circumlunar.space      70
18      i       Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
.....
26      i+------------------------------------------------------------------+   Err     republic.circumlunar.space      70
27      1 << Back to my gopherhole      /~katolaz/      republic.circumlunar.space      70
28      .
=

Well, if you want now to go to the resource at line 17, you would type:

!./g % 17 [ENTER]

when you are done with viewing the current resource, you just type:

q [ENTER]

at the gophed prompt (well, that one is indeed ed(1) prompt...), and you will be back at the gopher resources you had visited before. Typing

q [ENTER]

again will bring you back in history again. If you give a q command on the first page, you will leave gophed. If you would instead like to save the resource pointed by a selector, you will use the command:

!./d % NUMBER [ENTER]

where NUMBER is the number of the line where the selector appears in the current page. The resource will be saved at "HOSTNAME/URI" where HOSTNAME is the name of the host and URI is the path to the resource. If you don't remember which line is which, you can just give:

%n [ENTER]

at the prompt. If you don't remember which resource you are currently visiting, typing:

f [ENTER]

at the gophed prompt will give some hints. If you are an ed(1) user, you will totally understand what we are up to here, and probably will now have a good laugh. If you don't know how to use ed(1), instead, then this is probably the right time to start learning it. Remember: ed(1) is the standard editor, and an awesome one at that...

HND

KatolaZ