firstrun.gmi

Welcome to Tinysurfer, a smallnet browser built from the ground up to be ... well, I'm not really sure, to be honest.  Compatible with a bunch of things, mostly (gemini, gopher, some light HTTP[S]).  And as pretty as I feel like figuring out how to make it, that is to say "I used a couple of ANSI escapes to make the links blue".


I took a lot of inspiration on how to write Tinysurfer from the denizens of the sites it was created to browse.  One gemlog I found talked about Void Linux, and how many of its users and, by extension, denizens of its forums,  are people who take being the enemy of Bloat(tm) to the extreme of "Applications shouldn't parse config files.  If you want to configure something, just change the source and recompile it!" and the poster saw as how that was utterly f**king insane.  I agree.  If you're looking for a client without any bloat, look somewhere else, because this bad boy is built on top of urllib.  Anyway, point is, this program is complicated enough to warrant a config file, and it has one.  Further, I personally dislike applications that just drop you in with the defaults already configured, because that makes it easier for the user to just get used to the defaults rather than hunt for the settings panel and customize it to their liking from the get-go, and personalization is really difficult once you've already gotten used to something.  Because of this, and also because Tinysurfer's user interface isn't exactly intuitive, I put together this little setup utility and 10-minute tutorial which runs on first startup.

Sorry that last paragraph was a bit rambling.  Looks like my ADHD is showing again.

Anyway.  Let's get started.  I would love to be able to let the user move a cursor through the page using the arrow keys and then press Enter while hovering over a link to follow it, but I'm not smart enough to know how to do that, and I don't really feel like learning Curses right now.  Instead, Tinysurfer assigns a number to each link on the page, and you choose one by typing the number in at the prompt.  Not very impressive, I know, but it works.
What would you like to do next?
=> about:tutorial/empty_string Continue with the tutorial, complete with more pointless ramblings from yours truly
=> about:setup I already know how the program works, take me straight to the config so I can turn off these annoying zebra stripes
Alternatively, if you're cool with the defaults (which, as you can see, are... unconventional), just type a URL at the prompt instead to navigate to it directly.  You can come back to this page at any time by navigating to about:firstrun.