Posts from July 16, 2026

I've released v0.9.0 of Rogallo. The first big change in this release is the addition of syntax highlighting to pre-formatted text.

Much like in Markdown, Gemtext also supports pre-formatted text bounded by code fences. Gemtext supports the concept of "alt-text" for such text, like this:

```python
def hello(name: str = "World") -> str:
    return f"Hello, {name}!"
```

Until now Rogallo would simply show the text as-is (with some styling to make it stand out from normal paragraphs). From this release, if there is alt-text for the pre-formatted block, and if it's the name of a supported language, the content will have syntax highlighting applied.

If you're curious which languages are supported, it should be anything that Pygments supports.

Another significant change is to the user input dialog. As mentioned in an earlier post, the Gemini protocol imposes limits on how much text can be submitted to a capsule. As documented, the limit is for a resulting URI of 1024 bytes¹. To save someone typing out a long entry, only to have it lost², I've added a count of how much input is left available (calculated from the size of the URI that would result):

To help ensure that the user doesn't submit too much, I've also added an error display if you go over the limit, which also refuses to submit the input.

With these in place it should be a lot harder to run into an unexpected loss of input.

One final tweak is a small change to the optional link stripe system I recently added. While playing around with some other themes, I noticed that the styling didn't show up well, or at all, in many of them. So I've changed it a little so it now shows in all available themes. I'm still not convinced it's quite right -- I'll play some more. But at least now it's visible in all cases.

The Gemini Protocol makes it clear that the maximum length of a URI, when making a request, is 1024 bytes. This has implications for how large a user's input can be when responding to a 1x response. Because of this, I'd like to update Rogallo so that it lets the user know how much space they have left as they type in their input.

With this in mind I've released v0.7.0 of Wasat. This adds the following to GeminiURI:

• GeminiURI.MAXIMUM_LENGTH -- a constant for the maximum length of a Gemini URI (as mentioned above: 1024).
• len() support -- if you ask for the len of an instance of GeminiURI it will return the length of the full URI.
• GeminiURI.bytes_left is a property that tells you how many bytes are left until the limit, given the current URI.
• GeminiURI.too_long is a boolean property that flags if the current URI is too long to send to a Gemini capsule.

This should give me all I need to add some guardrails to the user input dialog in Rogallo.

I've bumped Gemtext to v1.0.0. I've gone from "this is test code" to "this is stable code" mostly because the library is so simple and I'm unlikely to add any radically new features to it¹.

This bump also has one small addition: I've added an alt_text property to the PreFormatted class. This exists to capture and make available any text that comes after the pre-formatted text marker. For example, this text:

```python
print("Hello, World!")
```

will now result in:

PreFormatted(content='print("Hello, World!")', alt_text='python')

If/when I add syntax highlighting of pre-formatted text blocks to Rogallo, this new property will make that possible.