Watching the Geminispace through a "Telescope" (part 2)

> Quick recap: in part one it was just written about how to get Telescope, especially the GIT version to keep up with the development branch and its newer features!

This second part about Telescope is ideally subdivided in four sections: the first section is a brief overlook about how is it organized; the second one is a quick tour over the main controls in order to mastering the use of Telescope; the third section is about making Telescope fancy and cool for your sight too, which is also my favorite one; the last one is about my personal evaluations.

The Mechanical Layout

Albeit is unusual talking about how a Terminal application looks like, even those kind of applications can have a clear or an unclear organization that make those hard to use or to understand.

Telescope drops in the first group, the layout is clear and easily to recognize. You have a top line with the name of the tab in use; plus other tabs if previously opened; content just begins at the second row, while the last two rows are reserved in order:

to show the useful information about the page, like the percentage

to display action performed or to open the internal command line.

> It looks like the last commit of Telescope introduced a regression regarding the counter, this will probably solved soon showing up just the percentage against the total lines, which is eventually better.

Operate the Telescope

All the people know that operating a telescope is easy only in the movies! Telescope, the client, is loyal with itself hence it has its learning curve that mostly depends how much you know about Emacs or Vi(m).

However If you, like me, have nothing to do with the aforementioned - and well known - editors, hence below a quick (and unordered) list of essential commands:

">" will open a dialog where type your capsule;

arrow up and down scroll the page line by line

page up and down scroll the page block by block

"tab" jumps across the links downward;

"tab + shift" jumps across the links upward;

"space" scroll the page down;

g (pause) T or t to move forward and backward across the tabs;

CTRL + ALT + F or B to move forward and backward the history page;

"enter" open the link;

ALT + "enter" open the link in a new tab;

Interactive Commands

Some commands can be typed using the colon ":" to insert them, below some useful ones:

tab-close - close the current tab;

tab-close-other - close all tabs but the current one;

tab-new - open a new tab;

Honestly I am not comfortable with these keybindings, future versions of Telescope will support customized keybindings configuration through external config files, hopefully.

Once this feature will be added, my ideal keybindings - based on a US layout - would be:

That should be enough for a comfortable navigation through the Geminispace.

Tuning your Telescope

So far, by default, Telescope offers a quite plain look and feel with very few customization in action; for instance: verbatim text is only recognizable because the mark-up ```; titles are bold although they keep the hashtag character, which is fine; links are blue and underlined. Basically all the main lines keep their special mark-up combination at the beginning; this actually does not disturb me.

However you can customize the look and feel with a simple file called "config" in your $HOME/.telescope folder.

Please consider the man page will explain better than me how customization works:

Telescope Gemini manual page

For my personal customization I partially modified the ones available in the documentation in order to accommodate those to fit better my needs, but read carefully below:

> my customization will work only on the latest git commits

I added comments to illustrate better what those configurations do:

> Refer to the manual for all attribute style you can use.

Currently everything is a little bit cold but you can change color to make it warmer as you wish. One think I liked to do was to remove the underline style for the links; this is an heritage from the HTML when it was used to distinguish hyper-text words from the regular ones. Since in Gemini everything is a line anything that resembles an arrow (=>) at the beginning is enough to identify that line as link. I am not still entirely convinced that the bold style is a good choice to display pre-formatted text but I like that is distinct from the normal text (also I loved the new feature that allows to remove the mark-up ```).

And this is how my Telescope looks like:

My last tweak added a bit of red on my customization ;)

Calibrating the Telescope

So far I have been talking about Telescope as it was a finished software, but the truth is that Telescope is still a young client with a lot of room for improvements. Although it is constantly adding new features, like the very recent "fuzzy search", I would report some areas that I would like to see improved as soon as possible.

Layout issues

By default the layout is shifted toward right, this doesn't work very well with a small terminal area and even though it provides an "olivetti-mode" to rendering the page exactly at column 0 (or 1), starting the text to the exact edge of the terminal doesn't help the reading.

Based on the current layout the trick for me would be something like this:

I try to render this better:

Tabs are nice however when you have multiple tabs is hard to recognize them on the "top bar". Those need a vertical line to separate each tabs from the others. Although the new fuzzy search displays all tabs available I would add a counter and wrap each tabs just to the first word something like:

Links issues

This is an area that can be improved further. I am pretty sure that some of my comments were already in the "secret Telescope to-do list", but since the moment is secret nobody knows its actual content, hence I must write about the link lines:

I already wrote about adding a number for each link line, in order to be able to type the number to follow the link; this is very useful when you have very long lists of links as you can find in the aggregators, otherwise you have to press tab till reach the links you want.

> The new fuzzy search can show up links as you type but it is always a couple of action more than just typing one or two digit though.

So far Telescope doesn't distinguish Gemini links from all the other external links. This is not a big deal but it would be nice to have it anytime soon.

Keybindings issues

This is more personal rather than a real issue, but so far the amount of controls is overwhelming: to learn and to maintain. My suggestion is to keep just the Emacs style and to create a simpler one scheme closer as much as any GUI Gemini Client. If enabling it through a config file or hard-coding into Telescope doesn't matter to me honestly.

Verbatim text issue

Verbatim or pre-formatted text is wrapped and I don't think is a good default option. I'd like to see for the future the verbatim text unwrapped by default with the choice to enable it by internal command line.

Wrapping This Up

There are already several TUI Client for Gemini. Probably Amfora is the one that already reach a good balance and stability. Amfora is cool, indeed, but personally looks like an homework well done, everything is done as expected and everything it is just right.

You can't avoid to use Amfora as paradigm but what makes Telescope exciting to me? Beside a layout more in line with my tastes what fascinating me about Telescope is the fact it is a laboratory of ideas and experimentation. Telescope in my opinion is going beyond only offering a decent client that just works, Telescope is looking for an innovative and enrichment approach to Gemini!

> Telescope is looking for an innovative approach to Gemini!

This is what I feel using Telescope, its details lead me toward this opinion, and this is why I like using and learning it.

Also this second part is done, the last part will be about integrating Telescope with Duckling-proxy, I hope to get the third part ready as soon as possible!

Go back to part one

Go to part three

For comments or suggestion write me at:

freezr AT disroot DOT org

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