[users] [ANN] Moonlander, the fancy graphical Linux client, is back (as an alpha version!)

Hello, citizens of the Gemini mailing list!

Back in May 19, I announced Moonlander here:
    gemini://gemi.dev/gemini-mailing-list/messages/000870.gmi

Unfortunately, that didn't last long. As quickly as it came, it went
away into the land of "broken, unmaintained pile of FOSS".

Today, I bring you, Moonlander! Well, a rewrite using the same name, but
hey, the only thing that matters is how fancy it looks, right?

Moonlander (then: "The fanciest Gemini client in the entire solar
system.", now: "Just another 'fancy' Gemini client") is a graphical
Gemini client, developed using Rust and GTK 3, to use under Linux.

(Nobody is stopping you from trying building on Windows. It'll probably
work if one cared enough to set everything up properly.)

Moonlander's main features (so far) include:

- GTK based GUI attempting to look native to GNOME-like desktops
- Fancy Gemtext rendering with an overcomplicated theming system
- Collapsing pre-formatted text into alt text
- Tabs
- URL bar search
- A bookmarks bar

And the broken or known missing stuff include:

- Inputs (1x codes) and client certificates (6x codes)
- A lot of other stuff. Check the README as it will be better updated than
this message.

If you think this deal is worth it, call now for a download of only $0.00
    https://sr.ht/~admicos/moonlander

If you still aren't convinced, here is a screenshot:
    gemini://ebc.li/images/moonlander-is-back/moonlander.png
    https://ecmelberk.com/images/moonlander-is-back/moonlander.png

So, you saw this coming, right? The dreaded accessibility check!

* The text of the page cannot be read by arrow keys. the keys move 
throughout the text, but Orca doesn't read it.
* The "tab overview" button is unlabeled.
* ... How do I get to the settings?

Other than that, I can access the back/forward/refresh buttons, and when 
new pages load, Ocra announces the title bar state change, which is really great.


On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 11:30:55PM +0300, Ecmel berk canlıer wrote:
> Hello, citizens of the Gemini mailing list!
> 
> Back in May 19, I announced Moonlander here:
>    gemini://gemi.dev/gemini-mailing-list/messages/000870.gmi
> 
> Unfortunately, that didn't last long. As quickly as it came, it went
> away into the land of "broken, unmaintained pile of FOSS".
> 
> Today, I bring you, Moonlander! Well, a rewrite using the same name, but
> hey, the only thing that matters is how fancy it looks, right?
> 
> Moonlander (then: "The fanciest Gemini client in the entire solar
> system.", now: "Just another 'fancy' Gemini client") is a graphical
> Gemini client, developed using Rust and GTK 3, to use under Linux.
> 
> (Nobody is stopping you from trying building on Windows. It'll probably
> work if one cared enough to set everything up properly.)
> 
> Moonlander's main features (so far) include:
> 
> - GTK based GUI attempting to look native to GNOME-like desktops
> - Fancy Gemtext rendering with an overcomplicated theming system
> - Collapsing pre-formatted text into alt text
> - Tabs
> - URL bar search
> - A bookmarks bar
> 
> And the broken or known missing stuff include:
> 
> - Inputs (1x codes) and client certificates (6x codes)
> - A lot of other stuff. Check the README as it will be better updated than
> this message.
> 
> If you think this deal is worth it, call now for a download of only $0.00
>    https://sr.ht/~admicos/moonlander
> 
> If you still aren't convinced, here is a screenshot:
>    gemini://ebc.li/images/moonlander-is-back/moonlander.png
>    https://ecmelberk.com/images/moonlander-is-back/moonlander.png
> 

-- Devin Prater
r.d.t.prater@gmail.com

Thanks for trying it out. I had plans to eventually try Moonlander with
a screen reader, but you seem to have beaten me to it :p

> * The text of the page cannot be read by arrow keys. the keys move
> throughout the text, but Orca doesn't read it.

So it doesn't read it at all? Not even as a big blob of text without any
formatting? I would've expected it to be un-formatted but still readable
considering it's still native widgets powering everything.

Though this isn't that big of a deal as I would've needed to create a
different "accessibility view" manually _anyway_, as the visual
formatting is done in a pretty hacky way that doesn't provide any
"structure" a screen reader or whatnot can detect.

> * ... How do I get to the settings?

Currently, there isn't any graphical settings. There is a config file in
your home/.config/moonlander/moonlander.toml, but no graphical
interface for it exists so far.

> Other than that, I can access the back/forward/refresh buttons, and when
> new pages load, Ocra announces the title bar state change, which is
> really great.

Considering I haven't done anything about accessibility software
integration so far, this is great to hear. I'll see what I can do about
the broken parts.

Hi everyone,

I am in the process of building my first capsule, and I had a couple of 
ideas on what to do for content. First I converted by wordpress blog to 
markdown and from markdown to gmi and that went well, so I've got a few 
years worth of content available already. Also, I run a personal Usenet 
server. I thought it would be cool to share the raw Usenet articles with in my capsule.

If you don't know, Usenet is 100% plain text. Let's say you wanted to read 
everything that's happening in rec.radio.amateur; you would go to the rec 
directory, then radio, then amateur, then the articles are listed as 
1,2,3,4. Like this: rec/radio/amateur/1. 1 is the first message on my 
server and again it is plain text.  However all of the gemini readers see 
this as something that they can't read, but if I were to rename this file 
to 1.txt or 1.gmi, then it could. Realistically, I can't rename every file 
because that would break my usenet server. Is there a way around this that 
I can trick gemini readers into seeing these files as plain text and then viewing them?

Thanks!

Jason

On 26.03.21 08:30, Jason Evans wrote:
> rick gemini readers into seeing these files as plain text and then viewing them?

You should be able to specify the mime-type, that gets sent to the client 
in your servers configuration file (How exactly this is done is different 
from server to server and should be documented somewhere in an example 
configuration, README or manpage).
Depending on what else you have there, setting the default mime-type 
unknown filetypes to text/plain should work. (I'm pretty sure some servers 
also support overwriting mime-types for whole folders or even using regex)

I hope that helps, have a nice day!

- Baschdel

Jason Evans <jsevans@mailfence.com> wrote:
> If you don't know, Usenet is 100% plain text. Let's say you wanted to
> read everything that's happening in rec.radio.amateur; you would go to
> the rec directory, then radio, then amateur, then the articles are
> listed as 1,2,3,4. Like this: rec/radio/amateur/1. 1 is the first
> message on my server and again it is plain text.  However all of the
> gemini readers see this as something that they can't read, but if I
> were to rename this file to 1.txt or 1.gmi, then it could.
> Realistically, I can't rename every file because that would break my
> usenet server. Is there a way around this that I can trick gemini
> readers into seeing these files as plain text and then viewing them?

The best way to do this is to configure your server to serve all of
these files with an MIME type of text/plain, if it doesn't do so
already.  Gemini clients don't (shouldn't) check any extensions in the
URL anyways, so this is the correct solution.

~aravk | ~nothien

On 3/26/21 9:12 AM, Baschdel wrote:
> On 26.03.21 08:30, Jason Evans wrote:
>> rick gemini readers into seeing these files as plain text and then viewing them?
> 
> You should be able to specify the mime-type, that gets sent to the 
client in your servers configuration file (How exactly this is done is 
different from server to server and should be documented somewhere in an 
example configuration, README or manpage).
> Depending on what else you have there, setting the default mime-type 
unknown filetypes to text/plain should work. (I'm pretty sure some servers 
also support overwriting mime-types for whole folders or even using regex)
> 
> I hope that helps, have a nice day!
> 
> - Baschdel

I'll check how to do that. I'm using the molly-brown server because it 
seemed like one of the easiest one to set up.

Jason

> I'll check how to do that. I'm using the molly-brown server because it
> seemed like one of the easiest one to set up.
>
> Jason

I think the setting you're looking for is MimeOverrides:
https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/molly-brown

"MimeOverrides: In this section of the config file, keys are path
regexs and values are MIME types. If the path of a file which is about
to be served matches one the regexs, the corresponding MIME type will
be used instead of one inferred from the filename extension."

If you need help forming a suitable regex, feel free to ask here (or
me personally, for that matter) :)

Cheers,
ew0k