How I met Project Gemini

By: gugod, 2021-11-10.

I learned about Product Gemini from this Emacs blog "Emacs Everything" written by Alex Schoeder. The author shares a lot of how they config their Emacs for web surfing and that seems difficult nowadays. Coincidentally I've also made some attempt to do so. Big fan of staying in mostly text-based user interface.

On one hand it is particularly interesting to me that people are trying to invent alternatives of HTML+HTTP. On the other hand it is completely normal to me that people trying to re-invent a simpler technology to replace something that's awfully complex. That is just minimalism, and I do fancy minimalism.

A few years ago I wrote a minimal implementation of HTTP 1/.1 client "Hijk", which is not more than netcat with a tiny bit of parsing HTTP headers. It's low-level, and users of this library have to know a bit of HTTP in order to correctly use this library. But just like Gopher and Project Gemini, it's minimal, and it's good for what it is doing.

They don't look fancy but by removing the fanciness, the look, it allows us to really focus on the content, the core. Which is something that's really been generally missing since web 2.0.

Although arguably Project Gemini is a tiny bit more complex than Gopher, of which is clearly the inspiration. Well, in terms of user experiences they are almost identical. You can't really tell the differences just by looking from the outside.

Emacs everything

Hijk