Posts tagged with "Python"

I've just bumped Port79 to v1.0.0. There's no significant change in this release, other than the addition of the usual dunder-based metadata that is common in Python libraries; somehow I'd managed to leave it out in the last couple of releases.

Now that I've successfully added finger support to Rogallo, and the library is working out well, there didn't seem much point in letting it hang around in zero-point-whatever-land.

Rogallo v1.1.0 is now available. This release includes a number of new features and improvements, plus a small cosmetic fix.

Diagnostics¶

On the off chance that someone else does use Rogallo, and needs help getting to the bottom of some sort of issue, I thought it might be useful to add a diagnostics command to the CLI. Right now it's pretty simple, just dumping some version and environment information.

$ rogallo diagnostics
# Libraries
bagofstuff: 1.2.1
cryptography: 49.0.0
gemtext: 1.0.0
rogallo: 1.1.0
textual: 8.2.8
textual_enhanced: 1.6.0
textual_fspicker: 1.0.1
wasat: 1.0.1

# Python
Compiler: Clang 17.0.0 (clang-1700.3.19.1)
Executable: /Users/davep/.local/share/uv/tools/rogallo/bin/python3
Implementation: CPython
Version: 3.14.0

# System
Name: Darwin
Release: 25.5.0
Version: Darwin Kernel Version 25.5.0: Mon Apr 27 20:40:51 PDT 2026; root:xnu-12377.121.6~2/RELEASE_ARM64_T8112

# Terminal
Detected: ghostty

Finger protocol support¶

This was something I was interested in adding, and a couple of people have already requested it, so Rogallo now has finger support. This has been added in a couple of ways. The first and most obvious is that finger: URIs are now natively supported in Gemtext content. So now if you follow a finger:// link you'll see the response in Rogallo itself.

The other method is to use the new !finger command that has been added to the application's command line.

Of course, in the command line, you can also just enter a finger:// URI if you wish, which I guess is a third way of doing it.

Finger URIs are recorded in the history, and can also be bookmarked.

Using an external editor for user input¶

This was also something I was keen on doing, and then someone else happened to ask for it: support for swapping out to an external editor for writing user input. While the current mechanism is fine for entering a one-liner -- or composing a very short message -- a proper editor (for me that's ideally one with the ability to check spellings) is generally going to be far more useful for a longer body of text. So, with this in mind, the internal editor can now optionally swap out to your text editor of choice.

If you have either VISUAL or EDITOR set in your environment (VISUAL beats EDITOR), Rogallo will let you swap to it by pressing F3 in the internal editor. You can also override that choice by setting external_editor in the configuration file.

Personally, I'm finding this is working really well with emacsclient. From now on, I'm going to find writing content in Geminispace a lot easier.

Blended pre-formatted text¶

Now that I've been wandering around Geminispace some more, I've noticed that a common use of pre-formatted text is for logos, ASCII art, that sort of thing. Generally, the sort of things that are best presented with the background the same as the surrounding text. A different shade of background is fine if showing code and stuff, but I feel that this:

looks better than this:

To this end, I've modified the pre-formatted text rendering so that, by default, if pre-formatted text has no alt-text, the background is the same as the surrounding text. On the other hand, if it does have alt-text (and so is likely the name of a programming language, which implies syntax highlighting, which in turn implies you want it to stand out), it isn't blended with the rest of the text.

If your preferences differ from mine, you can control this with the new blend_pre_formatted_with_background configuration file setting. It takes a list of alt-text strings that should be blended. By default it looks like this:

    "blend_pre_formatted_with_background": [
        "",
    ]

That is, by default, it only blends empty alt-text pre-formatted text. As it happens, Station uses alt-text for the logo and the user image, but I'd like them blended in too, so I'm running with this:

    "blend_pre_formatted_with_background": [
        "",
        "Station logo",
        "User image"
    ]

Doubtless I'll add others as I run into them.

Fixed mouse hover effect¶

The last change is a small cosmetic fix to mouse interaction with links. When the mouse cursor is over a link, there should be a hover effect (that is, the background should change colour). This wasn't working if you had link stripes turned on. This is now fixed.

A quick update to Port79. When I kicked this off I'd set up the FingerURI class so that it was pretty permissive in what it would accept. So, for example, you could do any of:

>>> FingerURI("davep")
FingerURI('finger://davep/')
>>> FingerURI("davep@example.com")
FingerURI('finger://example.com/davep')
>>> FingerURI("finger://example.com/davep")
FingerURI('finger://example.com/davep')

Nice and handy, right? Accept pretty much any input and turn it into a finger URI. However, once I started to add finger support to Rogallo, I realised that this wasn't as helpful as I'd like as it meant I couldn't use it to actually check for a valid URI. It would be more useful to have the class be strict about only being passed finger: URIs.

So now, the first two examples give an error.

>>> FingerURI("davep")
port79.exceptions.URIError: Invalid URI scheme: ''. Expected 'finger'
>>> FingerURI("davep@example.com")
port79.exceptions.URIError: Invalid URI scheme: ''. Expected 'finger'

Instead, if you want the more relaxed approach, you should use the from_string method.

>>> FingerURI.from_string("davep")
FingerURI('finger://davep/')
>>> FingerURI.from_string("davep@example.com")
FingerURI('finger://example.com/davep')

With this change I can confidently use FingerURI to test if any given input is an actual finger URI, and this also makes it work in a similar way to GeminiURI in Wasat.

While I'm having a moment of calling code stable, I've bumped Wasat to v1.0.0 as well. There's no actual difference here when compared to the last release, other than the development status classifier in the PyPI metadata and the version number.

The library feels pretty stable at this point. I've been using Rogallo every day for a wee while now and I've seen no surprising problems.

Thirty-three days ago, back on the 18th of June, I created a development directory called rogallo, and started adding dependencies and laying out the main user interface of Rogallo. It's been tons of fun working on it while exploring Geminispace. Given that it's quickly turned into my daily driver, and I'm finding it stable, I've decided it's time to drag it out of the 0verse and consider it worthy of being v1.0.0.

I was going to hold off a little longer, mainly because I wanted to flesh out the documentation some more, but that seems like a poor reason to keep it stuck somewhere in v0.x.

To recap, for anyone who might not have followed the development so far: Rogallo is a terminal-based client for the Gemini Protocol. I've built it for my own education. I've built it for fun. I've built it because I want to use it. I've built it hoping that someone else might enjoy it too. Some of the key features, as of this first "stable" release, are:

• Keyboard-first TUI interface with good mouse support too.
• Bookmark support.
• Forward/backward navigation.
• Location history.
• Home page.
• Designed to work on macOS, GNU/Linux and Windows.
• Trust-on-first-use support.
• In-application creation of client-side certificates.
• Full support for user input, both normal and sensitive.
• Full support for redirections.
• Context-sensitive help screens.
• All main application commands available via a command palette or an in-application command line.
• Themes.
• Responsive layout that dynamically adjusts to terminal resizing.
• Support for viewing Gemtext files in the local file system.
• View source support.
• Copy-to-clipboard support for URIs or page content.
• Optionally-numbered links with quick-jump support.
• Supports ANSI escape sequences in content.
• Supports filtering out ANSI escape sequences.
• Emoji filter (lets you remove emojis from most text).
• Support for handing off unsupported content to the operating system (with safety checks).

Probably some other stuff I've forgotten right now.

On top of this, there's more to come. v1.0.0 isn't the end of the line with Rogallo. I'm having plenty of fun using it, and improving it, and there's more I want to add. I very much want to add in-app support for the Finger Protocol, and I can see myself falling down the Gopher rabbit-hole¹ at some point too. While I don't want the application to grow out of hand, I can see plenty of extensions and enhancements that will be satisfying to add.

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 (note that Python 3.12 or later is required):

pipx install rogallo

It can also be installed using uv:

uv tool install rogallo

If you don't have uv installed, you can use uvx.sh to perform the installation. For GNU/Linux, macOS, or similar:

curl -LsSf uvx.sh/rogallo/install.sh | sh

or on Windows:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://uvx.sh/rogallo/install.ps1 | iex"

Once installed, run the rogallo command.

Now that Rogallo is starting to settle down somewhat, with all the main Gemini Protocol work falling into place, I've been thinking about adding one or two adjacent protocols. The two most common and obvious ones are Finger and Gopher. While I'm still undecided about adding the latter, the former seems like a fun one to include (if only because I've had an account on plan.cat for around four years now).

With that in mind, much like I did with Wasat, I wrote a spec for what I wanted and pointed Antigravity at it. The result is Port79. As well as providing a library, there's also a small finger clone CLI, which can be run with python -m port79 (if it's installed as a library) or with port79 (if installed along with any command scripts).

$ port79 davep@tilde.team

hello [removed],

Project:
  Rogallo: https://rogallo.davep.dev/

Plan:
  Currently building gemini://tilde.team/~davep/

Pronouns: he/him

$ port79 davep@plan.cat
Login: davep                            Name: Dave Pearson
Directory: /home/davep                 Shell: /bin/plan.cat
Last login Mon Jul 20 19:06:33 2026 UTC
No Mail.
Plan:
Rogallo v0.12.0, with some more QoL changes:
https://blog.davep.org/2026/07/20/rogallo-v0-12-0.html

To be clear: this isn't intended to be a serious finger command (like, why would anyone even need that?), it's just a tool within the library that can be used to do some testing within a development (v)environment.

At some point soon I'll be adding port79 as a dependency of Rogallo and adding finger as a "native protocol".

I've bumped Rogallo to v0.12.0.

The first change is a simple addition of a !theme command to the command line. As much as possible, I've tried to make sure that every command that's in the command palette can also be run from the in-app command line, but I'd managed to leave this one out. Now you can type !theme and get the theme picker.

Next is the addition of an OpenFile command, bound to Ctrl+o by default. This opens a dialog for browsing the filesystem, allowing for easy access to local gemtext files.

Related to this, if you now enter the name of a directory in the command line, the same dialog will open, starting at that directory. Both these changes should make finding local gemtext files a smoother experience.

Another change is to the way that the recently added emoji removal works. I decided that it was a little too aggressive, in that it shouldn't remove them from the content of pre-formatted text. In my experience in Geminispace, so far, pre-formatted text is where the more creative displays happen. Indeed, I had a go at this myself for my new page:

Here I've used ANSI escape sequences and half-block characters to recreate my usual avatar. The problem is: the emoji-removal approach I've used sees the half-blocks as something to remove. The result isn't great.

Given that the unwanted emojis will generally be those in body text, links, quotes and headers, I've tweaked the way that pre-formatted text is shown, with it not having emojis removed. I feel this is a sensible approach.

I guess, if anyone really objects to this, I could add a configuration switch that dictates how aggressive the removal is.

The final change is something I wasn't really ever planning on doing, and I felt I'd removed the need for it when I added link stripes. But I got a request to do it and, really, the cost of doing it is nothing. The request? An option to move the link jump labels over to the left.

So now there's a ToggleCosyLinkNumbers command (bound to Super+F8 by default¹) which does what it says:

Personally, I prefer them on the right, where they don't disrupt the left-aligned margin for all the text, but I can see why this would be far more comfortable for others, so... why the heck not?

A quick update to Rogallo, with changes concentrating on giving the user more control over the content of a rendered page.

Despite the fact that the Gemini Protocol and gemtext are all about things being minimal, some capsules can deliver pretty busy content. Personally, I rather like it, and I'm generally impressed at how creative some people are with these tools. On the other hand, I've noticed that some people don't always appreciate the use of emojis or ANSI escape sequences to provide colour. So, with this in mind, I've added a couple of features to help control the content.

The first is a command to toggle emoji removal. If you're finding the emojis in a page too distracting, use the command to toggle them off and on (bound to F6 by default).

The setting is sticky too, so if you're so inclined, you can turn emojis off and they'll stay off.

There's a similar command related to the handling of ANSI escape sequences. While some applications let you toggle this at the capsule level (AstroBotany is one example where it's part of the game's settings), not all do. So I've added a command to toggle this (bound to Shift+F6 by default).

With both these commands, if this sort of view isn't to your taste:

You can quickly and easily turn it into this:

I think I prefer the richer view, but I can see the utility of the more austere view.

Somewhat related to the above, I've also added the ability to configure the main "icons" that get used inside the rendered content. So if you don't like the choice of ⪢ for links within a capsule, ↗ for links outwith a capsule, or • for a list item bullet, you can change them in the configuration file.

Rogallo v0.10.0 is now available. This release has a number of changes, including some new features, some changes to the user interface, and a couple of quality-of-life improvements.

Maximum document width¶

Amongst some feedback someone left on a slightly unrelated post over on station there was mention of how a document "should" wrap at around 72 characters. While no rationale was given for the "should" part, I was happy enough to accept that this could be a preference for some people. With this in mind, I've added a configuration option to set a maximum width for documents.

While, personally, I prefer Rogallo's default behaviour (I work in an environment where I can resize a window, and I'm capable of doing it), I can appreciate that someone might want to cap it. So for folk who prefer this, they can now make Rogallo look like this (with maximum_document_width set to 80):

For the moment this can only be set via the configuration file. At some point I might make this more of a dynamic thing. I can imagine this being something handy, or at least fun, to change up as you're viewing different content.

Link jump timeout¶

The same feedback "suggested" that the link jumping facility that Rogallo has should have a timeout that clears the buildup of the number being looked for. This seemed like a reasonable thing to ask for. So, before, if you typed 1, a link with a label of 1 would be selected. If you did nothing for a while, and then typed 2, a link with the label of 12 would be highlighted. With the new timeout (set to 1 second by default, configurable in the configuration file), if you type 1 and then 2 more than a second later, first link 1 will be selected, then link 2 will be selected. On the other hand, if you type 1 then 2 within a second, 12 will be selected.

Setting the timeout to 0 disables this and Rogallo's link jumping facility will work as it did before.

Failed input recovery¶

With this new feature, if you send input text to a capsule and it rejects it for some reason, the input will be held on to. If you then visit the same URI again, the input dialog will be pre-populated with what you attempted to send a moment ago. This gives you the opportunity to edit anything wrong with the submission and try again.

Added all application commands to the command line¶

If you prefer to use Rogallo's command line more than the command palette, I've now ensured that all bindable application commands can be accessed via the command line. There's a difference in their form, to stay in keeping with the command line. So whereas in the command palette you'd run GoHome by typing go home, in the command line it becomes a !-prefixed snake-case command: !go_home.

All possible commands are listed in the help screen if it's brought up while the command line has focus.

Capsule navigation commands¶

Rogallo now has two new commands for quickly navigating within the current capsule path. GoToParent will navigate up a level in the path of the current URI, and GoToRoot will go to the root of the capsule.

Visited vs non-visited links¶

The icon for links is now used to show if a link is already in the location history (and so has been visited before), or not:

Here you can see that Account settings isn't in the visit history, but the other two links are. I was going to do the whole link, but I've never been a fan of how web browsers do this, so I've gone with just the icon. I've also made it subtle but still noticeable. So far, I'm much preferring this; I don't need it blasting out the difference, I just need it to be enough for me to notice¹.

Swapped around history and bookmark tools¶

Until now the "history" and "bookmarks" shortcut keys advertised in the footer brought up the sidebar-based management widgets. This made sense when that's all I had in Rogallo. For a while now though I've had palette-based search tools for both history and bookmarks. Normally I want to search for and select a bookmark or history item way more than I want to manage those lists. So I've relegated the sidebar-based tools to a secondary position and placed the palette-based search tools up front.

This also means that the default bindings have changed a bit. As always, you can discover the bindings with rogallo bindings.

Conclusion¶

I know I've nodded towards this before, but I think I'm getting close to making a v1.0.0 release. I want to daily-drive for a few more days, and I'd also like to expand the website. I'd also like to build a Gemini/Gemtext-based site for Rogallo -- it'd be pretty weird if I only documented it in http(s)space. I won't let those wishes become blockers for moving to calling Rogallo "stable", but it would be nice to have.

Wasat v0.8.0 is now available. This provides a small update to the GeminiURI class, adding three utility properties for extra URI manipulation.

• without_query - gives the URI minus any attached query
• parent - gives the parent path of the current URI (also minus the query)
• root - gives the root path for the current URI (also minus the query)

In each case, the result is a fresh GeminiURI instance.

These are added because I'm aiming to add "go to parent" and "go to root" commands to Rogallo.