Gemini with Emacs

Today I wanted to make myself a bit more comfortable with Gemini in Emacs. What it takes: a client to consume Gemini content and, of course, a major-mode to author Gemini content.

elpher

With elpher the client side can be covered. Originally a mere Gopher client, elpher can now also display Gemini content.

https://thelambdalab.xyz/elpher/

Installation

elpher is available from MELPA, which makes installation easy:

M-x package-install RET elpher

In addition, I have customized elpher a bit to my needs with the help of use-package:

(use-package elpher
  :ensure t
  :after visual-fill-colum
  :commands elpher)

Use :ensure t to make sure that the package is installed (or gets installed if it is not). You can find out what :after and :commands are used for in one of my previous posts:

More about :after and :commands

Furthermore, I use the visual-fill package and the visual-fill-column package to display the content centered in the buffer:

(use-package visual-fill
  :ensure t
  :commands visual-line-mode)

(use-package visual-fill-column
  :ensure t
  :hook ((elpher-mode org-mode) . visual-fill-column-mode)
  :custom
  (visual-fill-column-center-text t)

As you can see, visual-fill-column-mode gets also used for org-mode in my configuration.

Drawbacks

As a formerly Gopher-only client, elpher is still very Gopher-focused. This is especially apparent in the fact that Gemini URLs must always be entered with the gemini:// prefix. If the prefix is omitted, elpher assumes that it is a Gopher URL and automatically provides it with the gopher:// prefix.

gemini-mode

Now that viewing Gemini content in Emacs is possible, authoring Gemini content should obviously be as appealing as possible as well. With gemini-mode Jason McBrayer thankfully provides a major-mode for Emacs:

https://git.carcosa.net/jmcbray/gemini.el.git

Installation

gemini-mode is also available from MELPA, which allows for a very simple installation again:

M-x package-install RET gemini-mode

Of course, use-package can be utilized again:

(use-package gemini-mode
  :ensure t
  :after visual-fill-column
  :hook gemini-mode)

Since gemini-mode uses the visual-fill-column package when available, I ensure with :after that gemini-mode is loaded after visual-fill-column. In addition, I defer loading gemini-mode until the first use.

Drawbacks

After the first installation of gemini-mode I stumbled across the following error:

> File mode specification error: (error Lisp nesting exceeds ‘max-lisp-eval-depth’)

However, I could not determine exactly why this error occurred. A reinstallation ultimately fixed the problem.

Final words

At this point I may again refer to my full Emacs configuration, which is available at GitHub:

https://github.com/korwisi/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs

In addition, I would like to point out the channel of SystemCrafters, who explains the configuration of Emacs very well in a video series dedicated to setting up Emacs from scratch:

https://odysee.com/@SystemCrafters

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