3 |_ _|.-----.| |.-----.-----.----.-----.-----.-----.
4 | | | -__|| || -__|__ --| __| _ | _ | -__|
5 |___| |_____||__||_____|_____|____|_____| __|_____|
9 Telescope is a w3m-like browser for Gemini.
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...
15 There are still various things missing or, if you prefer, various
16 things that you can help develop :)
19 - tofu oob verification
21 - add other GUIs: at the moment it uses only ncurses, but telescope
22 shouldn't be restricted to TTYs only!
24 [](https://asciinema.org/a/425760)
27 ## Why yet another browser?
29 One of the great virtues of Gemini is its simplicity. It means that
30 writing browsers or server is easy and thus a plethora of those
31 exists. I myself routinely switch between a couple of them, depending
34 More browsers brings more stability as it became more difficult to
35 change the protocol, too.
37 However, Telescope was ultimately written for fun, on a whim, just to
38 play with ncurses, libtls, libevent and the macros from `sys/queue.h`,
39 but I'd like to finish it into a complete Gemini browser.
44 - Fun: hacking on Telescope should be fun.
45 - Clean: write readable and clean code mostly following the style(9)
46 guideline. Don't become a kitchen sink.
47 - Secure: write secure code with privilege separation to mitigate the
48 security risks of possible bugs.
49 - Fast: it features a modern, fast, event-based asynchronous I/O
51 - Cooperation: re-use existing conventions to allow inter-operations
52 and easy migrations from/to other clients.
57 Telescope aims to use the "Trust, but Verify (where appropriate)"
58 approach outlined here:
59 [gemini://thfr.info/gemini/modified-trust-verify.gmi](gemini://thfr.info/gemini/modified-trust-verify.gmi).
61 The idea is to define three level of verification for a certificate:
63 - **untrusted**: the server fingerprint does NOT match the stored
65 - **trusted**: the server fingerprint matches the stored one
66 - **verified**: the fingerprint matches and has been verified
67 out-of-band by the client.
69 Most of the time, the `trusted` level is enough, but where is
70 appropriate users should be able to verify out-of-band the
73 At the moment there is no UI for oob-verification though.
78 Telescope depends on ncursesw, libtls (from either LibreSSL or
79 libretls), libevent (either v1 or v2). When building from a git
80 checkout, yacc (or bison) is also needed.
82 To build from a release tarball just execute:
88 If you want to build from the git checkout, something that's
89 discouraged for users that don't intend to hack on telescope
94 sudo make install # eventually
96 Please keep in mind that the main branch, from time to time, may be
97 accidentally broken on some platforms. Telescope is developed
98 primarily on OpenBSD/amd64 and commits on the main branch don't get
99 always tested in other OSes. Before tagging a release however, a
100 comprehensive testing on various platforms is done to ensure everything
101 is working as intended.
106 Telescope stores user files in `~/.telescope`. The usage and contents
107 of these files are described in [the man page](telescope.1), under
108 "FILES". There's no support yet for XDG-style directories.
110 A sample config file is included in `contrib/sample.config`. Copy it
111 as `~/.telescope/config` to apply it.
113 Only one instance of Telescope can be running at time per user.
118 Telescope is distributed under a BSD-style licence. The main code is
119 under the ISC but some files under `compat/` are BSD2 or BSD3.
