https://ploum.net/2023-11-25-offpunk2.html

Blog Livres Software A Propos

Announcing Offpunk 2.0

by Ploum on 2023-11-25

I'm happy to announce the release, last week, of Offpunk 2.0.

Offpunk is an offline-first command-line browser/RSS reader. You
control it by typing command and it maintains a cache of all the
networked resources to allow you to access them offline indefinitely.

If a non-cached resource is tentatively accessed, the URL is marked
as to be fetched later. Running periodically "offpunk --sync" will
fetch those resources and add them to your "tour" to remind you that
you wanted to access it.

  * Offpunk official website
  * Offpunk 2.0 changelog
  * List of available offpunk packages

Screenshot

Mandatory screenshot showing Offpunk browsing Offpunk's website.
There's a screenshot of Offpunk in the screenshot. Mandatory
screenshot showing Offpunk browsing Offpunk's website. There's a
screenshot of Offpunk in the screenshot.

Switching the license to AGPLv3

Offpunk originally started as a branch then a friendly fork of AV-98.
It was called AV-98-offline and, as such, shared the same BSD
license.

  * AV-98, the first Gemini browser

During multiple discussions, Solderpunk and I came to the conclusion
that AV-98-offline was becoming too different from the initial goal
of AV-98. It was thus renamed Offpunk. At the same time, I grew
increasingly convinced that we needed more copyleft software and that
the AGPL license was better suited to protect the commons.

  * "We need more of Richard Stallman, not less", my take on why
    copyleft is important

As a symbolic move, I've thus decided to switch Offpunk license from
BSD to AGPLv3 but needed an opportunity to do so. The 2.0 release is
such an opportunity.

Multiple independent tools

Like AV-98, Offpunk was one single big python file. I liked the
simplicity of it. But it really became a mess and I wanted to offer
Offpunk's features as separate command-line tool. With Offpunk 2.0,
you will thus have three new command-line tools:

- netcache : when given a URL, will download and cache this URL or
only access the cache if the "--offline" option is provided.
- ansicat : will render an HTML, an RSS, a Gemtext or even a picture
in your terminal, with various options.
- opnk : universal opener. Will try to render any file or any URL in
your terminal. If it fails, it will fallback to xdg-open.

Those three commands should come with a man page and a "--help" but
they are still quite new. To my own surprise, I found myself using
"opnk" all the time. I don't think anymore about how to handle a
file, I simply give it to opnk.

Packaging those tools was a lot harder than expected and I want to
thank all the contributors to this work, including Austreelis, David
Zaslavsky and Jean Abou Samra.

Themes

The goal of Offpunk, through Ansicat, is to render web, RSS, gemini
and gopher pages as coloured ANSI text in your terminal. Until now,
those colours were hardcoded. With 2.0, they can be customised. See
"help theme".

Screenshot of Offpunk customised with the worst possible colours I
could find. Screenshot of Offpunk customised with the worst possible
colours I could find.

In offpunk, customisation can be made permanent by adding all the
commands you want to run at startup in your .config/offpunk/offpunkrc
file. Mine contains one single line: "offline", ensuring I use
Offpunk only in offline mode.

Getting started

Using Offpunk daily as your main browsing/rss driver takes some
learning. You need to get used to the Offpunk philosophy: adding
elements to tour instead of clicking them, creating lists to read
later, doing a daily synchronisation. It is not trivial.

The "help" command will probably be your best allies. The community
also provide support on a user dedicated mailing-list.

  * Offpunk-users mailing list

If Offpunk becomes useful to you, the community is open.
Contributions, documentation, blog post about how you use Offpunk,
help to new users and packaging are warmly welcome. Sometimes, simple
feedback is all it takes to make a developer happy. So don't hesitate
to contribute in one of our lists.

  * Offpunk-devel mailing list
  * Offpunk-packagers mailing list

I've also started an experimental Matrix room on #offpunk:matrix.org.
I have the belief that mailing-list is better suited for discussions
but I'm giving this the benefit of doubt and willing to explore
whether or not direct real-time discussion could help new users.

  * Join the #offpunk:matrix.org room

As a writer and an engineer, I like to explore how technology impacts
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