Posts from July 29, 2026

Rogallo has been updated to v1.3.0. This release adds an extra cosmetic feature to the Gopher support, and also extends what the internal command line is capable of.

Both of the changes come from suggestions made by -fab-, who's been an avid tester of Rogallo and a good source of pointers and ideas. The first change comes from a mention they made of how some Gopher clients will prefix links in a map with a three-letter ID to give a clue as to what the linked resource is. TXT for a text file, SND for any audio file, MNU for a link to a further map, that sort of thing. While I didn't add that when I initially added Gopher support, it did seem like a useful option to provide.

However, this being a "modern" TUI application, with access to a wee bit more than plain old ASCII, I thought I'd mix it up a little. By default, little "icons" or "badges" are shown with each link. So to take the examples given above, I'm using 📄 for a text file, 🎵 for an audio file, and 📁 for a menu.

Of course, some people might not want this, and this can be turned off entirely in the configuration file by setting gopher_show_type_badges to false. However, it might be that someone wants this, but not the emoji. That's where gopher_type_badges comes in. This is an association of Gopher types with text to use as the "badge". If three-letter all-ASCII "badges" are what you want:

"gopher_type_badges": {
    "0": "(TXT)",
    "1": "(DIR)",
    "2": "(CSO)",
    "3": "(ERR)",
    "4": "(HQX)",
    "5": "(DOS)",
    "6": "(UUE)",
    "7": "(FND)",
    "8": "(TEL)",
    "9": "(BIN)",
    "i": "(INF)",
    "g": "(GIF)",
    "I": "(IMG)",
    "h": "(WEB)",
    "d": "(DOC)",
    "s": "(SND)",
    "P": "(PDF)",
    "X": "(XML)",
    "unknown": "(???)"
}

The other feature springs from another suggestion -fab- made. This time it was the idea of adding direct command-line support for Gemini and Gopher search engines. This struck me as an excellent idea, but I got to thinking that it could be a little more generic than that. So I've added support for declaring simple command-line aliases. There's now a section in the configuration file¹ called aliases. It's an association of a command alias and an expansion. The alias itself must be a single "word" of characters, and the expansion the actual command that will be used. It can be any other command-line command, or a URI. Anything that the command line can normally handle.

When the user types something into the command line, the input will be split on the first space. If the first half matches an alias, it will be substituted for the input, and the tail of the input will be made available as a parameter to the expansion.

There are three placeholders that do the expansion:

• {q} -- The tail of the command quoted for use in a URI
• {qp} -- As above, but spaces will be + rather than %20
• {r} -- The raw, unquoted, tail of the command

I've probably done a bad job of explaining it. But hopefully the following default set of aliases will nicely illustrate it:

"aliases": {
    "fg": "gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/v2/vs?{q}",
    "gp": "gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/search?{q}",
    "ken": "gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/search?{q}",
    "tlgs": "gemini://tlgs.one/search?{q}"
}

Given this, if you type ken test search, the actual command that gets input is gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/search?test%20search. As I said, it's not just about search engines; you can also expand to other built-in commands. For example:

"whois": "!finger {r}"

Would have whois davep@plan.cat expand to !finger davep@plan.cat.

I feel this nicely solves the original request and adds an extra layer of utility to the internal command line.