Posts from August 22, 2026

I've released v1.12.0 of Rogallo. This version contains a number of internal changes, as well as some user-facing improvements.

Improved navigation history¶

For a wee while now I've been wanting to tweak the way the navigation history works. Up until this release, this was simply a backward/forward affair with no attempt to restore the actual context of a page you've gone back to. This could best be felt if you're a fan of AstroBotany. If you were to visit the flowering plants in your community garden, with a view to visiting each one and picking petals, the natural thing to do would be to visit a specific plant, pick a petal, then go Backward twice to get back to the list of flowering plants. The problem at that point is that the link for the just-visited plant would no longer be focused. This made it just a bit more faff to go to the next plant on the list.

From this release, when going backward and forward through navigation history, Rogallo attempts to ensure that the link you had followed on that page is focused again.

Internally, this caused a fairly big overhaul of how history navigation information is recorded. I've done a fair bit of testing and all seems good; but do let me know if you experience any oddness.

Showing empty content¶

This is a small fix. If you were to visit a URI that resulted in an empty document being received, the viewer would disappear. The viewer is supposed to disappear if you are visiting nowhere, but it shouldn't disappear if you're visiting somewhere that has nothing to show. This is now fixed.

Parent/root navigation¶

Rogallo has a couple of commands that make it easier to navigate to the parent directory of a visited location, and also to the root. However, I'd only implemented this for Gemini and Spartan URIs and sort of forgotten to finish this off. With this release Gopher and Nex get to join in on the parent/root navigation party.

Cancelling requests¶

This one came up because, as of the time of writing, the server where my wee capsule lives is dead¹. This meant that if I checked if it was there, and got impatient and went to navigate somewhere else, the somewhere else would load and then, after the defined timeout, the error about the previous request would pop up.

Rogallo now ensures that, if you have an in-flight request running, and then navigate elsewhere, that pre-existing request is cancelled.

Custom prompts¶

The in-application command line of Rogallo has two styles of prompt. The normal input prompt (shown as >), and the busy prompt (shown as a series of braille characters that animate as dots snaking around). I realised that some folk might enjoy setting their own prompts. While I think the defaults are nice and clean, if you wanted something more colourful and on-theme (in a Gemini sense anyway, which tends to be space-oriented), you could update your configuration file with:

    "command_line_prompt": "🚀",
    "busy_indicator_cells": "🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘"

and have this:

I'm currently running with this for my own installation of Rogallo and it's rather growing on me.