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Gophie is a modern, graphical and cross-platform client or browser for "The Internet Gopher" also known as the Gopher protocol. Gophie supports browsing gopher pages, using search engines such as Veronica-2, displaying images and downloading files.

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Gophie

Gophe is a modern, graphical and cross-platform client, or browser if you like, for "The Internet Gopher" which is defined in RFC 1436. It runs on Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux. It allows to navigate the Gopherspace as easily as navigating the World Wide Web. You can view Gophermenus, or Gopher pages if you like, read text files, view images and download content provided through the Gopher protocol.

Gophie on macOS View all screenshots

Installing Gophie

Gophie is very eas to install as it comes as a portable Java application in a JAR-file. Simply download the file and execute it on your computer. All Gophie requires is a Java Runtime Environment. It was built to work also with older JRE version and currently only requires JVM version 8.

Install on Windows

The Windows package is a ZIP-file that includes the EXE-file for Windows with Gophie. You can extract the ZIP-file and put it somewhere in a folder, on a USB stick, network drive or wherever you would like to store the EXE-file. Note that you still need the Java JRE from java.com/download to run the Gophie.exe file.

Install on Mac

The Mac package for Gophie is a DMG-file. You can download the DMG-file, open it and drag the Gophie icon into the application folder. Afterwards Gophie will be available in your applications and you can launch it from wherever you wish.

Install on Linux

The Linux package is simply a tar.gz-archive with an executable. The executable is a bash-file with the JAR-file attached. You can either double-click the executable named "Gophie" or launch it from the terminal of your choice. If you wish to have Gophie present wherever you need it in your system, just copy the executable file into your "/usr/bin"-directory.

Using the JAR-file itself

Double-click the Java JAR-file on Windows, Mac and Linux will automatically launch Gophie, if you have Java installed. If you do not have Java installed, you can get it from java.com/download.

Building Gophie

In order to stay small, reproducable and trustworthy, Gophie was not build with any large-scale IDE, but in plain and simple Java. You can clone this repository and build Gophie with your installed Java SDK yourself. Just run the make.sh shell script included in this repository.

./make.sh

The script will create a JAR-file in the build directory for you to run. If you wish to launch Gophie's jar file from the command line, simply use the java cli.

java -jar Gophie.jar

If you're having trouble with Gophie, it is quite verbose when it comes to errors and exceptions. It is recommended that you run Gophie through Java on the command line to get the exception and error message output it might report.

Configuration file

A configuration file named "config.ini" resides in a directory named "Gophie" in the user's home directory. The configuration file config.ini allows to configure the GopherHome, default charset, various colors and the font for the page view or content area. The following table outlines the main configuration options. For a complete list, please have a look into the config.ini itself.

Section Setting Default value Description
Navigation GOPHERHOME gopher.floodgap.com The GopherHome also known as "Homepage"
Network DEFAULT_CHARSET UTF-8 Charset to use for text encoding
Appearance PAGE_FONT Inconsolata (Custom) Font for the text in the page view
Appearance PAGE_FONT_SIZE 17 Font size for the text in the page view
Appearance PAGE_ICON_FONT_SIZE 10 Size of the icon font in the page view

All configuration settings are part of a corresponding configuration section. When changing the configuration file, please ensure to put the settings into the section the setting belongs to.

Gopher Protocol Support

Gophie aims to support the Gopher protocol from RFC 1436 entirely so that users have an unlimited graphical Gopher experience. The following provides an overview of which gopher items and part of the gopher protocol are supported. HTML files are currently not being rendered, but redirects with URL: in the Gopher item selector are supported and the user is prompted to open his system's WWW browser.

Item Type Code Support Handling
Text File 0 Fully supported Displayed inside Gophie
Gopher Menu 1 Fully supported Rendered inside Gophie
CCSO Nameserver 2 Only with terminal Works like Telnet, user needs to operate CCSO
Error Code 3 Fully supported Rendered inside Gophie
BinHex File 4 Fully supported Allows user to download this file type
DOS File 5 Fully supported Allows user to download this file type
UUEncoded File 6 Fully supported Allows user to download this file type
Full Text-Search 7 Fully supported Rendered inside Gophie
Telnet 8 Fully supported Executes "telnet://"-URI on the system
Binary File 9 Fully supported Allows user to download this file type
GIF File g Fully supported Displayed inside Gophie
Image File I Fully supported Displayed inside Gophie
Telnet 3270 T Depends on OS Treated the same as Telnet item
HTML file h Partially supported Opens WWW with browser, HTML displayed as text
Information i Fully supported Rendered inside Gophie
Sound File s Fully supported Allows user to download this file type

Protocol extensions are recommended extensions to RFC 1436 like Gopher+ or Gopher II are not supported by Gophie. The development of features focuses on implementing RFC 1436 and providing a seamsless experience for the user without sacrificing the proper implementation of the protocol specification.

Help and FAQs

If you need help with Gophie you can of course open an issue here on GitHib in case you really found a bug. You can also find me on freenode as @derjanni. If you have trouble using Gophie, kindly check this README file first before asking any questions. I will track all the questions and update the README file accordingly.

About

Gophie is a modern, graphical and cross-platform client or browser for "The Internet Gopher" also known as the Gopher protocol. Gophie supports browsing gopher pages, using search engines such as Veronica-2, displaying images and downloading files.

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