The viewer

Introduction

The viewer is the main widget in Rogallo's display. If you are viewing a Gemini page, a Gopher server or the response from a Finger server, this is where the result will be displayed.

When it has focus, the viewer has a number of keys that let you navigate the content. Where possible, many of the navigation keys that you might have muscle-memory for are available. You can always check what keys are available by calling on the Help command (bound to F1 by default).

When viewing a Gemini page or a Gopher menu, often there will be links embedded in the page. There are a number of ways that these can be navigated.

Links within the viewer are navigable widgets, just like other elements in Rogallo's user interface. As such you can move between them with Tab and Shift+Tab. Because these keys will eventually navigate you out of the viewer and on to other widgets in the user interface, there are some other keys that let you move between links and stay within the viewer:

←, Shift+↑, L - All navigate to the previous link.
→, Shift+↓, l - All navigate to the next link.

Jump to link

To speed up navigating to a specific link, Rogallo also provides a method of jumping to a specific link. By default each link in a document will have a numbered label shown to the right of the viewer (the position is configurable).

To jump to that link, simply type its number.

Configuration

Filtering out pre-formatted text

Because pre-formatted text can be used to generate site logos and similar, this can sometimes mean that you're faced with viewing the same ASCII art over and over again, that uses up vertical space, and means it takes longer to get to the content of a site. With this in mind Rogallo has a facility for hiding specific pre-formatted text. It is based on the idea that such pre-formatted blocks will have alt-text, and that we will normally only want to do it for a specific URI. As an example: suppose I wanted to hide my avatar image on Station, and also the site logo to save some space, I can set the following in the configuration file:

"hide_preformatted": [
    [
        "gemini://station.martinrue.com/",
        "Station logo"
    ],
    [
        "gemini://station.martinrue.com/davep",
        "User image"
    ]
]

As you can see, the filters are defined as a list of lists. The first value in each is the URI to match. This will match that location and all below it. So in the above gemini://station.martinrue.com/ would match that location, and also gemini://station.martinrue.com/davep and gemini://station.martinrue.com/example-user and so on. The second value is the alt-text for the pre-formatted text.

Markdown rendering

If Rogallo is served a Markdown file, it will convert it into Gemtext and render it. This makes it easier to navigate links, etc.

If you would prefer that Rogallo renders the text using its builtin Markdown widget, you can set convert_markdown_to_gemtext in the configuration file to false:

"convert_markdown_to_gemtext": false

The result of viewing Markdown will be more like this:

While the result is more in keeping with the document being Markdown, it will be trickier to navigate if you don't have a mouse (the issue being that Textual's Markdown widget is keyboard-hostile when it comes to navigation of links).