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