Yesterday I got the basic framework of my Gemini client up and going, and this evening I've been working on getting rendering of the gemtext in place. It's not the most tricky format to handle, so the parser and Textual widget to display the result have come together pretty quickly.
With this in place I've got the core of a working client now. Next up is going to be adding history with forward and backward navigation, then after that things like bookmarks and so on.
Following on from the initial release of Wasat yesterday, I've got a very basic proof-of-concept client up and running. So far, so good. Here it is loading up my own capsule on GemCities:
There's a lot to do yet, it'll be some time before this turns into a public project, but having it at least load up a document from a capsule means there's enough there for me to want to keep going and developing this.
Also, as I said yesterday, this is all home-grown and hand-crafted code. BlogMore has been tons of fun, but it's nice to kick off a significant bit of Python code where I'm writing it all myself. It's nice to be in that flow state once again.
I can't remember how and where I saw it, but just over a week ago I ran into Project Gemini. Somehow I've never read or seen anything about this before, which is pretty wild considering it's been on the go for around seven years now. As I read up on it I got more and more intrigued. I had the urge to do... something with it.
I think the thing I want to do, and I know I'm far from the first, is write a client for the terminal. I'm envisioning something very similar to Hike, but obviously only targeting the gemini protocol itself, and only handling and rendering gemtext.
I will, obviously, be looking to write this in Python, and of course, will be looking to use Textual, which means that it would be useful to have a Python client library for the protocol, and ideally a client library that is async. I did some searching, found client libraries, but none of them seemed to be async-first.
With this in mind, and to kick-start the project, last night I fired up Antigravity1 and got a library up and going. Wasat is the result. For the moment this should be considered alpha-status software (hence v0.0.1). I've done some very rudimentary testing and experimenting with it and, so far, so good. It's also proving to be a good tool with which to get to know the protocol. It also gives me another project to use to experiment with an agent (this being the first project I've started from scratch using Antigravity).
Over the next few days I'm going to toy with the library more, clean up the code, look for any issues, and then I'll start on the client application. That will be hand-built; no AI. I have some ideas of fun things I want to do, especially when it comes to handling gemtext.
It'll be nice to have a new pet project that's a hand-coded project. The first significant one since OldNews.
Getting back to Wasat itself: I believe it has everything necessary to allow for writing such a client (which, to be fair, isn't much -- that's kind of the point of the protocol). It also comes with a simple CLI built in, which can be run with python -m wasat (if it's just installed as a library) or with wasat (if installed globally, along with any command scripts). The command itself is just a simple download tool for a "page" in a "capsule". For example, I can grab the content of a test capsule I've created:
$ wasat gemini://davep.gemcities.com/
# Introduction
Hey! I'm Dave. Normally you'd find me at:
=> https://www.davep.org My web site
or
=> https://blog.davep.org My blog
amongst other places. But I discovered Gemini and I'm really curious about
the idea, so here I am giving GemCities a go to get to know things a little
better.
(with thanks to GemCities for providing a neat little service).
As for where this is all going: there's no direction, really. I've found a neat new thing that I didn't know about before, the idea sits well with me, and I want to explore it more. It also gives me an excuse to do a thing I really enjoy doing: writing terminal-based TUI applications for the sake of it, and especially writing one that works just how I want.