IN DEFENCE OF UMN GOPHER

There's been discussion amongst some phloggers about how strictly 
Gopher content should adheare to the Gopher standard in the modern 
age. With these things I generally prefer to practice than preach. 
It seems a bit of a silly discussion to me really, but perhaps I'm 
being ignorant. Who'd have thought originally that the Web would 
turn partly into a virtualised application platform with HTML just 
used as a sort of launcher? Or that the browsing of its more modern 
content would demand many multiples of the computing power that I 
personally require for any other personal computing task? Tacking 
on functionality is the path that it took, and my own stubborn 
attempts to quitely practice otherwise with websites I made sure 
didn't change any of that.

But anyway for now I'll leave that discussion be. What I did pick 
up on was a bit of "UMN Gopher? Who'd use that old thing anyway?" 
sentiement in response to IanJ's original post which pointed out 
issues browsing some Gopher holes with it. I do mainly use UMN 
Gopher, and I'm not alone according to IanJ's poll here:
gopher://gopher.icu/1/poll?poll=1707390454

Maybe it's just because I'm a stick-in-the-mud using a PC from the 
mid 90s for my recreational internet browsing (which is actually 
possible on its own for all my recreational activities _except_ 
browsing the modern Web and watching videos - even HTML and TLS in 
email can actually be coped with by a Pentium 1), but I think it 
has some worthy features besides just being the first Gopher 
client. Navigation in UMN Gopher is quite similar to Tin, which I 
use for Usenet. It's easy to navigate around using just the arrow 
keys, especially _because_ most text content isn't in gophermaps so 
menu options are more concisely listed and don't require bouncing 
all around multiple screen-fulls of text which is what puts me off 
keyboard-orientated navigation of Web page links in browsers like 
Lynx. As in Tin, the line numbers assigned to each menu option also 
allow quickly jumping down a long list of options simply by typing 
in the assigned number.

Other key assignments are admittedly wacky, and sometimes 
contradict the displayed instructions. I wont deny that UMN Gopher 
clearly suffers from being typical university-developed software 
where too many people were trying to get their own great ideas into 
it. But I think the text file viewer with its display of file size 
and percent of page position is very well suited to the job. 
Launchers for other file types can also be configured quite 
flexibly, although with a pretty wacky syntax.

On the down side it does hide some selectors that it doesn't 
understand, such as 'd' for documents (PDF/Postscript). Also for 
browsing Git repos through GophHub I prefer to use a Gopher plug-in 
for Dillo because I like the HTML syntax-highlighting and Markdown 
rendering and UMN Gopher doesn't pass Gopher-downloaded HTML over 
to a web browser for viewing, just the gopher:// URL for it to open 
(or, more likely now, not). The tabs in Dillo are usually pretty 
handy for browsing source code via GophHub too.

So no it's not ideal, but it's good enough for me, certainly 
lightweight enough to run on my old PCs, and better in some 
respects than any of the alternatives I've tried. I think there's 
good cause for me to use UMN Gopher, not just pretending it's the 
best simply because it was the first. Also it is still being 
maintained to the extent of still compiling for modern Linux with 
its Debian package, which is as much maintenance as I expect for 
such software anyway:
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gopher

Actually a lot of the software I use is in a similar sort of state 
(the text editer I'm writing this with, for example), and I'm 
perfectly fine with that too. The most annoying thing about the 
internet is that it allows other people to make their dislike of 
software I'm using _my_ problem, because they eventually find 
excuses for excluding it. On the phlog-posts-as-gophermaps 
navigation issue in UMN Gopher though, there is an easy 
work-around: Simply hit Shift-S while viewing the gophermap and 
save it to a (rendered) text file, then switch to another terminal 
and open that file using less, deleting it when you're finished. 
It's not so hard for the few times that it's required at the 
moment, though I would certainly get tired of doing it everywhere.

 - The Free Thinker

Prior discussion:
gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/The-state-of-gopher.md
gopher://gopher.unixlore.net/0/glog/response-gopher-icu-state-of-gopher.md
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240205-re-the-state-of-gopher
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2024-02-07_reStateofGopher.txt
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/gallowsgryph/phlog/2024-02-08_state_of_gopher.txt
gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/Responses-to-The-state-of-gopher.md