/FORG

Gopher browser

Primary LanguagePythonGNU General Public License v2.0GPL-2.0

Forg

The FORG is a Linux graphical client for Gopher written in Python. It will let you browse the world-wide gopherspace and handles various types of media, including HTML and video.

Table of contents

Features

  • Ability to load other programs with different file formats. I.e. this program does not interpret HTML, so you may want to associate .html files with Firefox, so it will be launched upon saving a .html file
  • Full caching of directories and files
  • Searching support. (Tested against gopher.floodgap.com's Veronica, but of course)
  • Bookmarking support. Bookmarks are written in XBEL and support arbitrary folders and subfolders
  • Bookmark editing, similar to Firefox
  • Directories are searchable by name
  • Statistics on size of cache, number of files in the cache, and number of documents in the queue
  • Ability to save files and directories. (Note: when directories are saved, the protocol information that the server sent is what is saved to disk...for now)
  • ASK menus - users can interact with programs on foreign servers through the use of miniature questionnaires
  • Right click context menus on all items providing all available information on a resource. (If the server supports Gopher+)
  • Between 0 and 100% complete implementation of Gopher AND Gopher+!!! :)
  • Managerspeak. This program leverages automatic internet data retrieval and storaging technologies for quasi-reliable interlocked handshake protocol interaction, allowing open-ended failsafe solutions to be developed in the realm of...oh whatever

Requirements

Python & Libraries

You will need 4 things. Python 2.7.x, Tkinter (should be bundled with Python), Pmw and Pillow. There is a good chance that your distribution has all of them in official repository. You can use pip if you cannot/don't want to use official repository.

Windows/MacOSX support

Theoretically, this program should run under these systems. I've never tested this theory and I'm not going to.

How to use

Basics

To run the program, run:

./forg.py host

as an example, host can be "gopher.floodgap.com", "gopher.meulie.net" or "gopher.quux.org", which are all valid gopher sites.
Alternatively, you can use URL syntax, as in:

./forg gopher://gopher.quux.org

Associate extensions

How to Associate extensions

Bookmarks

How to bookmarks

Original author

David Allen mda@idatar.com
http://opop.nols.com/
The upstream home page mentioned in original README is unavailable but if you are curious there is a copy of the site on archve.org

Why fork

Original program is no longer maintained (latest release is from 2001) and doesn't work well with newer Pythons (quote from original readme: "The version of python required is 1.5.2, (...) Python version 2.0 is strongly suggested."). This fork aims to address those two problems.

To do

  • Port to newest Python 2.x Work in progress
  • Port to Python 3.x
    • Remove dependency on xmllib
    • Move as much as possible to syntax compatible with both Python 2 and 3
  • Change name
  • Stop using PMW (library doesn't look alive)
  • Scrolling with mouse wheel
  • Start using flake8

License

GNU General Public License, version 2 - copy of the licence is in COPYING file