1 ```
2  _______         __
3 |_     _|.-----.|  |.-----.-----.----.-----.-----.-----.
4   |   |  |  -__||  ||  -__|__ --|  __|  _  |  _  |  -__|
5   |___|  |_____||__||_____|_____|____|_____|   __|_____|
6                                            |__|
7 ```
8 
9 Telescope is a w3m-like browser for Gemini.
10 
11 At the moment, it's something **a bit more than a working demo**.
12 However, it has already some interesting features, like streaming
13 pages, tabs, privsep, input from the minibuffer etc...
14 
15 There are still various things missing or, if you prefer, various
16 things that you can help develop :)
17 
18  - subscriptions
19  - tofu oob verification
20  - client certificates
21  - add other GUIs: atm it uses only ncurses, but telescope shouldn't
22    be restricted to TTYs only!
23  - configuration file: even proposals are accepted.  It needs a way to
24    define keybindings, colors etc in a way that will possibly work on
25    more than one graphic libraries.
26 
27 ![Telescope new tab](images/about-new.png)
28 
29 
30 ## Why yet another browser?
31 
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
35 on my mood.
36 
37 More browsers brings more stability as it became more difficult to
38 change the protocol, too.
39 
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.
43 
44 
45 ## Goals
46 
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
53    model, it shouldn't never lags behind the user input.
54  - Cooperation: re-use existing conventions to allow inter-operations
55    and easy migrations from/to other clients.
56 
57 
58 ## TOFU
59 
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).
63 
64 The idea is to define three level of verification for a certificate:
65 
66  - **untrusted**: the server fingerprint does NOT match the stored
67    value
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.
71 
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
74 certificate.
75 
76 At the moment there is no support for oob-verification though.
77 
78 
79 ## Building
80 
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.
84 
85 To build from a release tarball just execute:
86 
87 	./configure
88 	make
89 	sudo make install
90 
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
93 
94 	./autogen.sh
95 	./configure
96 	make
97 	sudo make install	# eventually
98 
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 platform is done to ensure everything
104 is working as intended.
105 
106 
107 ## License
108 
109 Telescope is distributed under a BSD-style licence.  The main code is
110 under the ISC but some files under `compat/` are BSD2 or BSD3.