Procrastination yield

Getting back to work was hard after the December holidays. It's not the work itself what's holding me back but being in my bubble was so damn nice. Like not wanting to get out of a bath, you know I'll have to, it's going to get really uncomfortable..

Anyway.. inside my bubble, I wondered how hard it would be to make my own gemini client, I threw a very basic CLI together in Racket and, satisfied, started doing some work-work. All was fine for a couple of days, gemini was, together with regular work, boring again, so procrastination was back to normal, drinking coffee, doing nothing, watching the birds in the garden.

But what about a GUI? It's been awhile since I dipped my toes into some "native" windows and widgets stuff. But how hard can it be? I navigated some of that other network and found this:

Markdown View using the Racket editor%

Wooha! I can do that! I made some coffee and ignored more work-work to get me some GUI. Within a couple of hours I was zipping through gemini space using my own featureless browser. It didn't have a location bar (does now!), didn't do caching (does now!), still doesn't do TOFU (trust everything and always) and won't allow me to tend to my astroplant (did I mention Racket and OpenSSL client certs are not plug-n-play?) but I was flying!

I must admit, elpher is still my portal to the small nets. I don't known if I'll ever "finish" this browser thing but if you're interested, it's tucked away on a branch of the dʒɛmɪni project. At this time it's on the "cli" branch, maybe it's merged into "master" by the time you read this or hidden away somewhere else. Who knows.. it's the digital age, stuff just disappears.

(dead?) link to source

repo refs to find it yourself

Things I've learned along the way:

playing with Racket GUI felt like playing with Tcl/Tk in the 90s (fond memories)

there's a place for Ooh-Ooh-programming (I should not be such a snob)

there are awesome articles about programming in Racket I just don't known were to find them (yet)

Cheers,

R.

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📅 2021-01-25

🏷 racket, gemini

📧 hello@rwv.io

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