So I took some time today to put solderpunk's new gopher client VF-1
[0][1] through its paces. I'm using whatever version is currently
installed on SDF. First let me say that I love the interface design,
despite it being quite different from lynx and gopher I got used to
it pretty quickly (as in a few minutes). I think anyone with REPL
experience will feel at home with it. The search facility and
veronica commands are very useful. I particularly like the
auto-generation of menus after each operation, whether that be a
search or link extraction (and that last is quite handy).

Speaking of link extraction, I had a few bugs creep into my last
session. Here is a transcript:

VF-1> url
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/slugmax/phlog/pale_blue_dot
VF-1> links
[1] (gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/gunnarfrost/20180116.post)
[2] (gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Pale_Blue_Dot)
[3] (gopher://en.wikipedia.org:70/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot)
[4] (gopher://www.loc.gov:70/item/cosmos000110/)
VF-1> 2
VF-1> <enter>
[1] <direct URL>
[2] <direct URL>
[3] <direct URL>
[4] <direct URL>
VF-1> ls
[1] Continued...
[2] Continued...
[3] Continued...
VF-1> 

Now those last two links are not gopher links at all, they are http
links, and a quick glance confirms the parser is assuming gopher
links. That said, even though link #2 was correctly parsed, it does
not display. Further it seems like the internal data structures were
corrupted somehow, after hitting 'enter' and typing 'ls' you can see
the results.

Everything else I tried worked great, including adding bookmarks,
searching with 'veronica', paging via less, formatting with fold,
and navigating history and menus.

One suggestion - I know this version keeps track of the most recent
prior gopher menu, what about storing menus on a LIFO stack? This
would be subject to a maximum depth, after that the least-recently
used menu falls off the bottom of the stack. Associated with this
would be commands to display and go to a specific stack entry by
number, or just to pop and visit the most recently pushed menu. The
latter would of course alter the stack, so you could repeatedly pop
your way through prior menus. Maybe this is not needed with history,
but I think it matches gopher's hierarchical menu structure and gives
you a way to quickly navigate a site without viewing history.

That's it for now, I'll keep banging on VF-1 and see what shakes
out!

[0] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/introducing-vf1.txt
[1] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/files/vf1.py