[ANN] [tech] Romulus Gemini Client

[Luke Emmet]

Hi Frank

Thanks for the feedback.

On 20-May-2021 06:13, Frank Jüdes wrote:

> a very nice program and easy to install on Windows. I have been feared in the past by our developers for discovering even the weirdest issues in their programs… I have tested your program - on Windows - against my server, so here's a list for you: 😜
>
>   * It does not display *all* characters, defined in Unicode version 13.
>     - That is very likely nothing you can fix before Micro$oft gets its
>     act together and fixes the issues with the terminal-window object!

Yes Windows Terminal is getting better, but it's not perfect yet. I found this checklist about getting the best display of unicode which helps a bit. Certainly you need to use the new Terminal, not just the default Windows shell.

https://akr.am/blog/posts/using-utf-8-in-the-windows-terminal

>   * If there are a lot of headers in the document, the /structure/
>     display overflows and only the top headers will be displayed:
>     gemini://h2903872.stratoserver.net/cgi-bin/man2gmi/-k%20str

Yes, that's a known limitation for now, although most Gemini pages have less than 10-20 headings which works fine. I might add a scrolling list for such situations, but my thinking for now is that generally having them directly in a menu makes for rapid interaction.

I think Romulus is the first console application to show the document structure, but I'm happy to be corrected if not.

>   * Something doesn't work right when you paste a Gemini-URL out of
>     another browser into the input-box of Romulus, it either reported
>     that i was unable to connect or crashed:

Yes, it expects a full URL, so if the "gemini://" scheme is missing it did not default to it.
This is now fixed in an upcoming commit.

>   * The time-out of five seconds prevents some of the CGI programs on my
>     server from being used with Romulus:
>     gemini://h2903872.stratoserver.net/cgi-bin/figlet/Romulus - will
>     sometimes work, when the big, fat Database on that machine isn't
>     allocating all resources to itself, but usually if fails with a
>     time-out. It would be nice to be able to configure the timeout.

Its a possible enhancement, certainly the underlying library SmolNetSharp allows this as a parameter on the request itself.

I've created some issues on the repo to cover the above items.

> That's it! - I'm trying to make it run in Linux and will test there.

Thanks - I'd be interested to hear how you get on

 - Luke