2024-12-07 12:39:22 # Bombadillo notes ## Background I recently re-discovered the joy of browsing the web from text-mode clients (such as w3m and eww). Earlier today I thought about and reflected upon an unsatiable desire to *write*. About anything. Something happens and I think of recording it down in some way. An idea crawls into my mind and I feel like I need to talk about online or in my personal journal. Otherwise, it feels as though I cannot contain all these things in my mind, that I will forget everything some day and it would all be a waste. Come to think of it, I rarely look back on the things I do end up recording. Sure, old photos and journal entries are a joy to look over. But in these situations, material can only be deemed old after at least two years. Most of what I write ends up being "cringe" to look upon for my future self anyway. There are only certain cases where I can think without writing or speaking about what I'm thinking. For instance, when I'm deeply absorbed reading or listening to something else, my mind wanders into either a topic completely unrelated or barely tangential to the content I am consuming. I found that I think well when I am supposed to (or initially planned to) do something else. It's like how people say, their best work is produced when they're supposed to be doing something else. Unfortunately, as a social creature, I wish to share my ideas to friends and people in some communities. I enjoy discussing about topics from people's personal blogs as well as my own. Clearly, the best solution is to write on a publicly accessible place and share the URL with those I want to share the content with. However, fear and anxiety and other factors contributing to my writer's block is holding me back. Most of what I want to write doesn't fit on my primary blog. All the polished stuff goes there. I can only write somewhere that anyone can access only when they specifically point there browser to the direct URL. Put it outside the web and behind the walls of the small internet for good measure. Many proxies exist that lets me share things to those who can't access gopher or gemini, if I need to. I looked into many options. - Self-hosting (I previously did this, but it was all taken down when I was moving stuff on my VPS around, and I figured this isn't a very good long-term solution. Too much overhead that prevents me from focusing on the actual writing) - Using online services such as smol.pub. I have revived my blog/gemlog/phlogs there. Unfortunately, though, smol.pub has a public discovery feed that I can't seem to opt-out of. It also seems to be automatically appearing on feed-aggregators such as skyjake's Cosmos. - A shared server, such as a pubnix. On rawtext.club, there is also a similar "discovery feed". The recent(++) tool. I'm fine with people running their own scripts to discover a list of all newly updated content from other people's homedirs, but the recent tool is something most users on RTC know and use. I don't feel comfortable having my content appearing there every time I update something. (Note, this phlog, which is currently hosted on RTC is a little different to the kind of blog/gemlog/phlog I am describing, and wanting to create) ... And so on. Testing and exploring options on the small internet required me to quickly spin up a client on a separate terminal pane to test out updates on my site (and gopherhole, etc). Lagrange is my primary smolnet client, but today I reached for bombadillo, the first gemini and gopher client I ever used when first discovering this space back in 2020. As I explored pages from bombadillo, I was reminded of what I felt like to browse the web from w3m. Simple, quiet, calm. It's a kind of experience that no GUI can replicate. In the rest of this post I will record some notes where I consider using bombadillo as my primary TUI smolnet browser. ---------------------------------------------------------------- ## Navigation j/k move page (similar to J/K in w3m) b/f or h/l back/forward d/u move page by 75% of screen command R reload toggle between bm and normal panels ## Command :c[heck] :search (config searchengine) ## Bookmarks B show bookmarks :add/:delete --- Comparison to amfora: it may be that the version of bombadillo's manpage is a little outdated, but I couldn't find any configuration related to client certificates. Amfora also supports a built-in feed reader, which I don't really need. I wonder whether multi-line inputs work in bombadillo. --- Comparison to gelim (NB: my own client): gelim colorises headings and links in gemini and spartan. I'm also more familiar with it (otherwise, this post wouldn't exist). Perhaps I should stick to bombadillo as a finger and gopher client, and use gelim when I want to browse gemini and spartan (and nex) from the terminal.