fur

fur: command-line Gopher client

This is my crappy command line Gopher client.

This project exists only as a scratchpad for me to experiment with the Gopher protocol, which I am interested in/fascinated by for absolutely no good reason whatsoever. There are better libraries and tools around, with better levels of completeness. Probably better to use those.

I shoved some nice things in here because it was easy:

• HTML rendering using (a fork of) https://github.com/MichaelMure/go-term-markdown/
• Image rendering for I and g types using https://go.shabbyrobe.org/termimg/
• Automatic unpacking of UUEncoded (6) types, which I added before I noticed that I can't find anything that uses 6 anywhere.
• Error detection

Expectation Management

Feel free to use this or take bits from it as you see fit (MIT license == go nuts). I won't maintain this to any kind of standard though. This is a scratchpad and a bit of fun for me, not a product. Issues may be responded to whenever I happen to get around to them, but PRs are unlikely to be accepted.

Install

Source only:

go install ./cmd/fur

Using

Easy!

$ fur gopher.floodgap.com
$ fur gopher://gopher.floodgap.com
$ fur hngopher.com
$ fur -tx=i search "hacker news"

Then if you see a link, just copy and paste it in a subsequent invocation to fur.

To get the raw output, use the --raw flag.

HTML item types (h) work best if you have w3m installed.

Links

Gopher sites:

• GopherPedia
• Floodgap
• SDF Public Access UNIX System
• Large list of known gopher servers
• Search Gopher with Veronica-2
• Hacker News
• Metafilter

Gopher history/general:

• gopher://gopher.viste.fr/1/gopher-faq
• https://tedium.co/2017/06/22/modern-day-gopher-history/
• https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm
• https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/the-web-may-have-won-but-gopher-tunnels-on/
• http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/relevance.html
• http://muffinlabs.com/2013/06/12/goper2000---a-modern-gopher-server/
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269784
• https://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit/IEEE-L7-http-gopher.html
• http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/bio-soft/1992-October/003180.html

Gopher articles of interest:

• https://jfm.carcosa.net/blog/computing/hugo-gopher/
• gopher://baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20181102.txt
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13855634
• https://box.matto.nl/revivegopher.html
• https://www.gkbrk.com/2019/06/gopher-server/
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885

Libraries:

• https://crates.io/crates/gophermap (Rust)

Server:

• http://aftershock.sourceforge.net/ (Ancient, Java)
• http://gofish.sourceforge.net/
• http://mateusz.viste.fr/attic/grumpy/ (GPL, last updated 2011)
• http://motsognir.sourceforge.net/
• http://r-36.net/scm/geomyidae/file/CGI.html (MIT/X, Basic Gopher+ meta)
• https://github.com/asterIRC/uGopherServer
• https://github.com/dotcomboom/pituophis (Python, BSD)
• https://github.com/gophernicus/gophernicus
• https://github.com/ix/geomyidae
• https://github.com/jgoerzen/pygopherd (GPLv2)
• https://github.com/knusbaum/cl-gopher
• https://github.com/michael-lazar/flask-gopher
• https://github.com/muffinista/gopher2000/
• https://github.com/pgodwin/GopherServer (C#, MIT)
• https://github.com/prologic/cgod
• https://github.com/spc476/port70 (Lua, GPLv3)
• https://github.com/tehdragonfly/gopher_server (Python, MIT)
• https://gitlab.com/emilengler/gophers
• https://github.com/grufwub/gophi (Go, GPLv3)

Gopher protocol:

• https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1436
• https://sdfeu.org/w/tutorials:gopher
• gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/0/gopher/tech/gopherplus.txt
• https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-matavka-gopher-ii-03
• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.mac.announce/xbgsusdfETc/S2793OidrSQJ
• https://lists.debian.org/gopher-project/2018/02/msg00038.html

TLS:

Seems that the best way to handle this is to allow clients to just talk TLS.

Might also be good to return an explicit error if a client attempts to use STARTTLS.

• https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2019-03-07-gopher-server-tls.html
• https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/Comments_on_2018-01-10_Encrypted_Gopher
• https://github.com/0x16h/gopher-tls/
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20171646
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16811407
• gopher://tilde.team/0/~rain1/phlog/20190608-encrypting-gopher.txt
• https://lists.debian.org/gopher-project/2018/02/msg00038.html
• https://gopher-project.alioth.debian.narkive.com/9VYGBcDp/adding-tls-and-or-ssl-support-to-gopher
• https://github.com/erkin/gophwr/wiki/TLS
• https://lists.debian.org/gopher-project/2020/03/msg00005.html

Crawlers:

• gopher://gopherproject.org/1/eomyidae

Clients:

• https://github.com/jgoerzen/gopher
• https://thelambdalab.xyz/elpher/
• https://rawtext.club/~sloum/bombadillo.html (https://tildegit.org/sloum/bombadillo)
• https://github.com/jankammerath/gophie
• https://github.com/solderpunk/VF-1 (BSD-2, TLS)
• https://metacpan.org/pod/release/WGDAVIS/Net-Gopher-0.43/lib/Net/Gopher.pm (Gopher+)
• https://www.macintoshrepository.org/265-turbogopher-2-0-3
• https://github.com/xvxx/phetch (MIT, TLS)
• https://github.com/erkin/gophwr (Racket, MPL2.0, TLS)
• https://gitlab.com/commonshost/goh (JavaScript, Proxy, No License)
• https://gitlab.com/commonshost/goth (JavaScript, Proxy, No License)
• http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows (Windows, GUI, No License, Closed Source)

Gemini:

Protocol

• gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/1/~solderpunk/gemini

Servers

• https://github.com/spc476/GLV-1.12556 (Lua, GPLv3, Gemini)
• https://github.com/grufwub/gophi (Go, GPLv3)

Clients

• https://sr.ht/~julienxx/Castor/ (Rust, GUI, Gopher, Gemini, MIT)
• https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/AV-98