5 |_ _|.-----.| |.-----.-----.----.-----.-----.-----.
6 | | | -__|| || -__|__ --| __| _ | _ | -__|
7 |___| |_____||__||_____|_____|____|_____| __|_____|
11 Telescope is a Emacs/w3m-inspired browser for the "small internet"
12 that supports Gemini, Gopher and Finger.
14 At the moment, it's something **a bit more than a working demo**.
15 However, it has already some interesting features, like streaming
16 pages, tabs, privsep, input from the minibuffer etc...
18 There are still various things missing or, if you prefer, various
19 things that you can help develop :)
22 - tofu oob verification
24 - add other GUIs: at the moment it uses only ncurses, but telescope
25 shouldn't be restricted to TTYs only!
27 [](https://asciinema.org/a/426862)
30 ## Why yet another browser?
32 One of the great virtues of Gemini is its simplicity. It means that
33 writing browsers or server is easy and thus a plethora of those
34 exists. I myself routinely switch between a couple of them, depending
37 More browsers brings more stability as it became more difficult to
38 change the protocol, too.
40 However, Telescope was ultimately written for fun, on a whim, just to
41 play with ncurses, libtls, libevent and the macros from `sys/queue.h`,
42 but I'd like to finish it into a complete Gemini browser.
47 - Fun: hacking on Telescope should be fun.
48 - Clean: write readable and clean code mostly following the style(9)
49 guideline. Don't become a kitchen sink.
50 - Secure: write secure code with privilege separation to mitigate the
51 security risks of possible bugs.
52 - Fast: it features a modern, fast, event-based asynchronous I/O
54 - Cooperation: re-use existing conventions to allow inter-operations
55 and easy migrations from/to other clients.
60 Telescope aims to use the "Trust, but Verify (where appropriate)"
61 approach outlined here:
62 [gemini://thfr.info/gemini/modified-trust-verify.gmi](gemini://thfr.info/gemini/modified-trust-verify.gmi).
64 The idea is to define three level of verification for a certificate:
66 - **untrusted**: the server fingerprint does NOT match the stored
68 - **trusted**: the server fingerprint matches the stored one
69 - **verified**: the fingerprint matches and has been verified
70 out-of-band by the client.
72 Most of the time, the `trusted` level is enough, but where is
73 appropriate users should be able to verify out-of-band the
76 At the moment there is no UI for oob-verification though.
81 Telescope depends on ncursesw, libtls (from either LibreSSL or
82 libretls), libevent (either v1 or v2). When building from a git
83 checkout, yacc (or bison) is also needed.
85 To build from a release tarball just execute:
91 If you want to build from the git checkout, something that's
92 discouraged for users that don't intend to hack on telescope
97 sudo make install # eventually
99 Please keep in mind that the main branch, from time to time, may be
100 accidentally broken on some platforms. Telescope is developed
101 primarily on OpenBSD/amd64 and commits on the main branch don't get
102 always tested in other OSes. Before tagging a release however, a
103 comprehensive testing on various platforms is done to ensure everything
104 is working as intended.
109 Any form of contribution is appreciated, not only patches or bug
110 reports. The contrib directory is for external things such as sample
111 configuration files, themes, scripts and things like that.
116 Telescope stores user files in `~/.telescope`. The usage and contents
117 of these files are described in [the man page](telescope.1), under
118 "FILES". There's no support yet for XDG-style directories.
120 Only one instance of Telescope can be running at time per user.
125 Telescope is distributed under a BSD-style licence. The main code is
126 under the ISC but some files under `compat/` are BSD2 or BSD3.
128 `data/emoji.txt` is copyright © 1991-2021 Unicode, Inc. and
129 distributed under the [UNICODE, Inc license agreement][unicode-license].
132 [unicode-license]: https://www.unicode.org/license.html
