Gopher (UMN Terminal Client)

Stars: 4 of 5

Out of all the Linux distributions I use regularly, only Debian
still has a dedicated Gopher client in its standard software
repository.

	sudo apt install gopher

It took some, well, digging (sorry) to determine that the text-mode
gopher client included in Debian's apt repository is the University
of Minnesota's classic client, updated occasionally for
compatibility (and apparently at some point to support gopher+).

https://github.com/jgoerzen/gopher

It's really user-friendly and thorough. It's a TUI app, like Lynx
(which is still included in most Linux distros, and which also
still supports Gopher) or Nano, so you use arrow keys and page up/
down to navigate around in your terminal window, and other keys to
search in the current page, download a file, or open another site,
or add /remove bookmarks, etc. Help is literally one ? keypress
away.

Modern menus with work just fine. Each menu item is labeled with
its line number, and lines that point to something other than text
files are also labeled: / for menus, <Picture> for pictures,
<?> for searches, <HTML> for external web links, etc. Web pages are
handed off to Lynx, or you can choose another program.

I've only run into two problems using it:

1. Dialog boxes are supposed to close with a CTRL-C (to cancel),
   but it doesn't always work. CTRL-X (to accept the change) does
   seem to work, at least.
2. Lynx doesn't know what to do with gemini:// links after Gopher
   hands them over. This isn't gopher's fault, and it's easy to
   work around it by writing a short script that will send gemini
   URLs to amfora and http(s) to Lynx.

Compiling it on other modern distros requires a few tricks, but
it's doable. I've gotten it running on Fedora 44 so far.
gemini://ghostwheel/tech-tips/gopher-compile.gmi

— Kelson Vibber, 2026-10-21