Gopher (UMN Terminal Client)

★★★★☆

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

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+).

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.