Up Buttons for exploring capsules

2020-01-12 | #browsers | @Acidus

My favorite feature of Elaho is without a doubt its "up" button. Here is what it looks like:

Elaho's up button

Often I land in someone's capsule reading awesome content, and I want to explore more of their capsule. Gemini content is minimal, so it lacks the navigation elements you usually find on web pages (nav bars, breadcrumbs, click-the-logo to go to home, etc). While minimalism is the point, this can make it tough to get to other parts of a capsule.

Take this post by ~sean on Atari 2600 BASIC, which is great.

An IDE for BASIC, on a machine with 128 bytes of RAM

While are links at the bottom, only a few are for the current capsule, and those are deep links to older content than the current page. There is no way to get to an index or home page.

This is where Elaho's "up" button helps. It takes you "up" a segment of the URL.

/dir/file.gmi -> /dir/

/dir/ -> /

Having navigation buttons like "up" in the client makes it very easy to explore new parts of a capsule.

Elaho was the first gemini client I used and that up button delighted me. I've tried some other GUI clients (Lagrange on macOS, deedum and Ariane on Android) and while I like parts of them, they don't have an up and I really miss it. Instead I have to click into the address bar and try to delete parts of the URL, which is a huge pain. I love Elaho's up button so much that, even though it is an iOS app, I use it as my main gemini browser on an Apple Silicon mac mini.

So please, gemini browser makers, consider adding an "up" button to your clients. It makes gemini exploring more delightful.