With v0.5.0 I've added a method for getting the list of currently-trusted hosts, and also added a public property to the client class for getting access to the trust store object.
Generally these shouldn't be required, shouldn't be something you'd normally want to work with; I've added them because I thought it might be another useful way of populating the suggested completions facility in the command line inside Rogallo. The idea being: if you're trying to remember the name of a capsule you've visited before, and it might have fallen out of the location history, its trust status might still be recorded so it can complete from there.
I've just released Rogallo v0.6.0, which contains the last big feature that was missing to make it a viable daily-driver Gemini Protocol client. That feature? Client certificates.
From now on, if you visit a capsule that requests a client certificate, rather than an error being shown, a dialog will pop up:
When you select the Create button, the certificate will be created and then, from then on, when you visit the capsule, that client certificate will be used.
As you might have noticed, there are "advanced options" available too. Most are just optional values that go into the certificate itself:
The two advanced options that mostly affect how all of this works are the scope and the transient option. The transient option means that the certificate is only good for the lifetime of this run of Rogallo. If you close Rogallo, the certificate will be discarded. In almost all cases, you'll want to leave this turned off.
The scope toggle affects the scoping of the certificate. As I've been able to understand, the strict reading of the Gemini Protocol says that a certificate should be scoped to the host, port, and path where it was first requested and generated for. However, out in the real world, it seems there are applications built for the protocol that don't work well with that approach. With this in mind, I've built Rogallo to always scope to just the domain and port, by default. If you want a particular certificate to follow the strict letter of the specification, turn the "Scope to domain/port" option off.
With all that in place, it should now be possible to use Rogallo with any Gemini application that needs client-side authentication. For the last couple of days, I've been using it to successfully play AstroBotany, for example.
As I said: with this in place, I believe Rogallo has all of the basic requirements of a Gemini protocol client covered. I'm not quite ready to call it v1.0.0 just yet -- there's a fair bit of testing and tweaking I still want to do, and I can see that, when it comes to certificates for example, there's some extra error handling I need to throw in. Additionally, the "advanced" version of the certificate create dialog is kind of tall for many terminals; I think I might need to play with the layout a bit.
Also, as I've mentioned a few times: I want to get proper documentation written and hosted on a dedicated site.
Back to this release: there's also a handful of other QoL changes and fixes. These include:
Any page that is opened from an in-page link is now always retrieved from the remote location, bypassing any cached copy. The idea being that, if someone is actively navigating documents, they will want the freshest version of the new page.
Fixed the layout of list items. Before now, the text wasn't wrapping, while, at the same time, space was being made for the text as if it was being wrapped.
The bookmark search palette is no longer available if there are no bookmarks to search (the idea being that not being available is less confusing than being available but empty).
The connection timeout, read timeout, and maximum number of redirects can now be set in the configuration file.
The title area of the viewer now has a key icon that appears if a page is using a client certificate.
Pages that require a client-side certificate are never added to the cache (the idea being that such pages are more likely to have dynamic content, and so the freshest version should always be loaded).
Reworked what is recorded in navigation and location history to ensure that what is saved is the landing URI, not the URI that was first visited. This solves the problem of what happens during redirections, and so also solves the issue of what happens with 10/11 response inputs (having the resulting query appear in history could result in duplicated "submissions" to whatever app was in use).
With these enhancements and fixes in place, I'm going to keep tending my plant, and posting away on Station, as a way of continuing to shake down the application. With that in mind, if anyone knows of any other sites and apps I should be testing against out in Geminispace, do let me know!
By this point today I was hoping to have released a new version of Rogallo, complete with client certificate support. It is more or less all there and ready to go, but I ran into a small problem, something which confused me.
You see, according to the documentation for the Gemini Protocol, when there's a request by a capsule for a client certificate, that certificate should be scoped to the host, port and path and all paths below it. So that means that if example.com/foo causes a certificate to be requested, it's good for example.com/foo and example.com/foo/bar, but it isn't valid for example.com/other.
Makes sense.
The problem I ran into pretty quickly, with my implementation of this in Wasat and Rogallo, was this: I hit a site (a microblogging site of sorts) that had a joining page at example.com/join. Once you joined up and set your user name, you'd normally land at example.com/me. They're sibling paths and so should not use the same certificate. However, this was done via redirection, so I did some work to "clone" a certificate when there's a redirection.
But then it got more complicated. The site also lets you follow other people. This means that if you visit example.com/other-user you should also still have the client certificate in place so the capsule knows who you are (because client certificates are also, in effect, session cookies, as I understand it), so you can perform the follow. Again, this is a sibling path, and there's no redirection, so the certificate is no good because, at this point, it's scoped to example.com/join and example.com/me.
Meanwhile: testing this with Lagrange, it had no such problem whatsoever. How was it getting around this issue? Was I doing something wrong? Was I misreading the specification for the protocol? Was Lagrange being a bit more relaxed about its certificate scope?
After doing some digging, it would seem that it's the latter. It looks like it, and perhaps other clients, take a pragmatic approach to certificate scopes and generally scope them to the host and port alone, ignoring the path (in the case of Lagrange it seems to sort of actually divorce the certificates from the URIs anyway, treating certificates more as identities you can associate with any capsule, etc).
Given this, at least for now, I'm going to take that approach. Any time a certificate needs to be generated in Rogallo, I'm going to give the user the option (on by default) to scope the certificate to the whole host/port combination. Later on I might add the ability to fully manage certificates (right now that can be done by editing the certificates file in the data directory, but a proper UI for it would be nice).
Which brings me to this release of Wasat. v0.4.0 adds some extra functionality to GeminiURI that allows changing and removing individual parts of the URI. There's a new replace method that can be used to create a clone of a URI with various parts changed. Also, if you just want to change one specific part or simply prefer method chaining approaches, I've also added more with_ methods similar to the pre-existing with_query method, so now there's also with_host, with_port and with_path.
With these in place I can go back to Rogallo and carry on with the last bits of work I want to do on client certificate support, with Wasat making it easy for me to clone up and chop and change URIs to suit the scoping requirements.
Wasatv0.3.0 is now available. This is a pretty small update, but one that's going to be useful in the next release of Rogallo. I've now got client certificate support up and going in the application, and I thought it might be useful to show the user if a given page is using a client certificate or not (and, perhaps, at some point, make the details of the certificate available as part of some page information dialog).
With this in mind, I've added client_cert_path and client_cert_used properties to the Response class. The former is the path to the certificate used (if one was used), the latter is a simple boolean flag to say if a certificate was used at all.
Of course, client_cert_path could be used for both purposes as it'll be None if one isn't used, but client_cert_used will read better in code if that's all that's needed.
I've made a quick update to Wasat, my async Gemini Protocol client library for Python. Now that I'm at a point where I want to add client certificates to Rogallo, I'm essentially shaking down the support for this in Wasat.
One thing I wanted right away was a certificate that, in effect, never expires. So with this release of Wasat I've added an option where the days to expire can be set to None, which results in the expiration date being set to 9999-12-31.
As mentioned in the last release, I've been afk for a week and a bit, enjoying some downtime over in the Netherlands. Although... it wasn't exactly all afk. I did take a keyboard with me and, while time permitted, I did tinker on Rogallo. That's resulted in quite a few TODO items being ticked off, and quite a few changes and improvements being made.
It's a small tweak, but I found it useful. The status bar of the main viewer panel now shows the MIME type of the document currently being viewed. Normally it will be showing text/gemini:
but Rogallo can show some other text/ types too, so this will also make it obvious what you're looking at:
You might also notice that, depending on the theme being used, the "correct" MIME type gets a "this is fine" colour whereas anything else is in a more "neutral" colour.
Now, if a document comes in that isn't text/gemini, there is no attempt to parse and render it as Gemtext; it's just shown as a simple block of plain text.
Given the above changes, Rogallo now makes an effort to guess the MIME type of any local file you view. This should help ensure that only Gemtext files get parsed and rendered as such.
Where possible, when confronted with a MIME type that Rogallo can't handle, it will attempt to hand it off to your environment's main web browser. While not ideal, I have no wish to turn Rogallo into a terminal-based general content browser/viewer; this is all about Gemini and Gemtext.
It's now possible to set a home page with either a SetHome (which prompts for a URI) or a SetHomeToCurrentLocation (it does what it says) command. There is also a GoHome command that takes you to the home page you've set. The default bindings for all of these can be found by either running rogallo bindings, or by viewing the help screen; pulling up the command palette is also an option.
Bookmarks are now supported. The ToggleBookmarks will show/hide the bookmarks list. AddLocationToBookmarks will add the current location to the bookmarks. SearchBookmarks lets you search the bookmarks.
The completion suggestion facility in the application's command line (where you enter URIs or commands) has been enhanced to include suggestions from the navigation history, the location visit history and the bookmarks. This should make it a little easier to enter a URI you're trying to remember.
Having added the SearchBookmarks command, it made sense to also add a SearchHistory command too. So with that you can quickly search all the locations you've visited (within the limits of the history) and head back to one.
While not something that should generally be obvious to the user, the Gemtext rendering engine has been optimised a little to reduce the number of Textual widgets used to display a document by consolidating all adjacent plain paragraphs.
Some Gemini sites use ANSI escape sequences to add colour to pages. While this isn't, as far as I can tell, part of the standard for Gemtext, it's a simple thing to support and so Rogallo has supported rendering this for a while; if a page has colours, they'll be used.
This meant that if you asked to view the source of a page, you'd also see that rendered in colour. I felt that wasn't in the spirit of viewing the source.
So now, if viewing a page like this:
When you go to view the source, instead of all of the colours still being rendered, you now get to see which ANSI escape codes were used where:
One small change is that, any time a document is loaded (from bookmarks, history, the command line, etc), the viewer now gains focus. Something I kept forgetting to do and finally I got fed up with having to tab over to the viewer each time.
Rogallo now has a content cache for pages loaded from capsules (the aim is to never bother caching content loaded from the filesystem). Any page that is loaded with a success status code (20) gets cached, and when you go back to it, if it's within the TTL of the cache entry (by default set to one hour), the content of the page will be loaded from the cache rather than making a fresh request.
Using the Reload command always bypasses the cache.
There is also a ClearCache command which will delete all cached data.
The TTL of the cache can be changed in the configuration file by updating the value for cache_ttl. Also, if you don't wish to ever use a cache, you can set with_cache to false to disable it.
With all of the above, I feel this gets Rogallo close to being v1.0.0-ready. Not quite, but very close. The main addition that still needs to be tackled is client-side certificates. I don't anticipate this being too tricky, it's just more a case of needing to play around with the code I've got so far, and needing to think about how to implement it in a TUI-friendly way (if, indeed, there are any considerations there at all).
For now though, as long as you don't need a client-side certificate, there's plenty to play with and try out.
I've updated Rogallo to v0.4.0. The main new feature in this release is support for capsule-requested user input. There are some other simple additions too.
I've added a Reload command, bound to F5 by default. As you might imagine, it reloads whatever page you're looking at right now.
I've also added a pair of commands for copying things to the clipboard. There is CopyLocationToClipboard (bound to ctrl+shift+c by default) which, as the name suggests, copies the current location (either the Gemini URI or the path to the file depending on what you're viewing) to the clipboard. In a similar way, CopyDocumentToClipboard will copy the content of the document you're viewing (bound to alt+shift+c by default).
It's worth noting that the default bindings for both of those aren't going to be ideal for some terminals. They should be fine in any terminal that supports the Kitty keyboard protocol, but will likely do nothing elsewhere. This can be changed to your taste via the configuration file1.
Talking of a document's content: I've also added a ToggleView command (bound to F3 by default) which toggles the document's view between a rendered view and a plain text (source) view. So if you're looking at a page like this:
and want to know what the underlying source looks like, just toggle the view:
Finally, the most significant addition is support for capsule-requested user input. This handles a 10 or 11 response from a server, prompts the user for input, and then sends it back as a query.
It's worth noting that the sensitive input (response 11) isn't done in the most obvious way, on purpose. Normally I'd have taken the "do obscured password input" thing, which is supported by Textual's Input widget. The problem there though is that an input request from a Gemini server expects and allows for multi-line input2; that requires the use of a TextArea; it doesn't support password-style input.
So what I've done instead is, if it's a sensitive input request, I simply greatly lower the contrast of the text vs the background. This should match the "reduce shoulder-surfing opportunities" requirement while not making it impossible to see what you're doing.
Normally I wouldn't be satisfied with this approach given that the text will still be visible, but I think it's a fair solution given one glaring problem with Gemini's sensitive input facility: the input is always sent back as a URI query string. That means that the resulting input is part of the URI, will be visible in any URI display on the screen, will be part of the history, etc. The sensitive part is only about making it less obvious at the moment of input, so I think this approach is in that spirit.
So... that's it for v0.4.0, and that's also likely it for the next week or so. I'm going to be super busy in AFK life next week and into the week after, so work on Rogallo will pause. It's almost a shame, I'm having tons of fun working on it.
As mentioned in another post about Rogallo, how to do that will be documented when I get round to writing the documentation for Rogallo. Meanwhile look at similar documentation for Hike to get an idea of how to go about it. ↩
Well, technically, it's an optional feature of a client; the specification says "Clients MAY allow for the entry of input composed of multiple lines". I wish Rogallo to be one such client. ↩
I've released Rogallo v0.3.0, which mostly concentrates on adding command line support and sorting support for browsing files in the local filesystem. There are also a couple of cosmetic configuration options thrown in.
Starting with the cosmetic configuration options: I got to feeling that the URI-containing tooltips that show on mouse-hover over a link might be a bit much for some people, so I've added show_link_tooltips to the configuration file1. Set it to false to make the tooltips go away.
Similar to this I've also added disable_animations. Out of the box Textualloves its animations. This is arguably most noticeable if you have a long body of text in a scrolling widget (such as the document viewer in Rogallo), as you use PgUp, PgDn, Home, End, etc., it'll scroll in a fancy animated way. It looks cool for a moment but I can imagine plenty of people getting sick of it, or feeling sick because of it (I sense this is an a11y issue too). With this in mind if disable_animations is set to true they'll all be turned off.
Rogallo now also has a number of command line options that can come in useful. In part borrowing from a number of my other TUI applications, and also adding some specific to Rogallo itself. They can be easily found with the --help switch:
Because I feel it's important that people know where applications drop things in your filesystem, there is the directories command, which shows you which directories are used by Rogallo.
The how of changing bindings still needs to be documented, but it's the same as with most of my other TUI applications, so if you look at how it's done in OldNews, for example, you should get the idea.
This command can be used to open a location from the command line. You can pass it either a URI for a Gemini capsule, or the path to a file in the local filesystem.
Talking of viewing files in the local filesystem... that's now supported too. This is something I wanted to build in from the start, as I feel it could be handy to anyone writing gemtext files prior to deployment. I sense there might be a couple of edge cases relating to this that I might still need to iron out, but mostly it seems to be working well.
At some point I'll probably also pull in textual-fspicker so that the user can browse for files to view, making it just a little easier to open a file in some cases.
So far, to connect to a Gemini capsule, it's been necessary to provide the full URI. That's kind of annoying. It had been deliberately left like this until I sorted the work to allow specifying local files, as I wasn't quite sure how it would all interact. Now that I've got that in place I could address this too. So whereas before you had to type gemini://davep.gemcities.com/ to get to my test capsule, now it's enough to enter davep.gemcities.com.
There is some guesswork going on in the background, with the resolution rules looking something like this:
Have I been given a URI that is obviously a Gemini URI?
If not, if it has no scheme, and it matches the name of a file in the filesystem, let's assume the user meant that.
If it's not a file in the filesystem, and it doesn't have a scheme, let's slap gemini:// on the front and see how we get on with that.
None of the above applied, yet it has a scheme: throw it at the operating system's URI resolution system.
In casual testing so far this is working out well.
I'm still having a blast working on this, and there's still a lot more to do. The TODO list is staying pretty constant in size at the moment because, as I knock an item off, I seem to keep finding new things I want to add or improve. I see this as a good thing.
I have a very busy AFK life for the next week or so, so I don't imagine too many updates during that period. Once things have settled again I want to try and tackle the two big issues of user input and client certificates. I'll be happy that Rogallo is getting close to generally usable when I know I can log in and water my plant in Astrobotany.
~/.config/rogallo/configuration.json on most systems. This and all the options within will eventually be documented, when I get round to creating the site to document Rogallo. ↩
I've just made an initial release of a new library related to my ongoing project to build my own Gemini protocol browser. Initially, the code to parse the hypertext format used for Gemini sites, lived in the Rogallo codebase. But despite it being a pretty simple bit of code, I felt it could be useful for other things too. So rather than have it be buried inside a package that has a lot of other dependencies, I've decided to spin it out into its own little package.
So gemtext v0.1.0 is now available. The library provides a single parsing class, which takes raw markup as a string and turns it into a sequence of objects, each typed for the type of line found. A very simple parsing tool might look like this:
# This is a heading
## This is a sub-heading
### This is a sub-sub-heading
=> gemini://davep.gemcities.com/ Dave's test capsule
> This is a deep and meaningful quote
```
Here is some pre-formatted text.
Here's some more of that text.
```
* One
* Two
* Three
the output would be this:
Heading(content='This is a heading',level=1)Paragraph(content='')Heading(content='This is a sub-heading',level=2)Paragraph(content='')Heading(content='This is a sub-sub-heading',level=3)Paragraph(content='')Link(content="Dave's test capsule",uri='gemini://davep.gemcities.com/')Paragraph(content='')Quote(content='This is a deep and meaningful quote')Paragraph(content='')PreFormatted(content="Here is some pre-formatted text.\n\nHere's some more of that text.")Paragraph(content='')ListItem(content='One')ListItem(content='Two')ListItem(content='Three')
That's the extent of the library for the moment. I don't see it growing too much, given how straightforward the markup language is. Perhaps one addition I might make at some point is a method of going the other way: allow collecting together each of the individual line-oriented objects and getting a text document back, so providing an object-oriented interface for producing Gemtext documents.
For now though this is enough to support what Rogallo needs.
Rogallo v0.2.0 is now available. This version fixes some issues with links, makes gemtext parsing better conform with the specification, and also makes it easier to see where a link will take you.
The first issue is a fix to how page-relative links were resolved if the page you were viewing was the result of a redirection. What was happening was the links were being resolved relative to the initial URI, rather than the final URI of the redirection. This was most noticeably a problem when following links in the geminispace equivalent of webrings. The main change took place in Wasat, with Rogallo making use of the new Response.uri property.
The second fix was to how I parse gemtext. The initial parser was close enough, but I noticed there were some finer points relating to whitespace that I hadn't paid attention to (mainly due to skim-reading the specification). For example, I expected links to always start with => followed by a space, when in fact a link can simply start with a => and then be followed by the URI with no space.
Similar improvements to the detection of headings and quotes have also been added.
Finally, I've added a couple of features which make it easy to know where a link will take you. The first is that I've added a tooltip to each link, so that when you hover the mouse cursor over it the URI will be displayed. But, because not everyone is mouse-oriented in the terminal1, I've also added a status bar to the main viewer panel that shows the URI of the focused link.
As you tab through the links it will update, of course.
This should ensure that links are less likely to be surprising.
If any of this sounds interesting and you want to have a play, Rogallo is licensed GPL-3.0 and available via GitHub and also via PyPI. If you have an environment that has pipx installed, you should be able to get up and running with:
