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