Browsing Gemini with Lynx at portal.mozz.us 
===========================================

A couple of years ago, I posted on the 
Lynx mailing list about adding Gemini 
support to the browser.[1] That's never 
happened. It's too bad, because Lynx 
supports a *lot* of protocols: gopher, 
http(s), telnet, ftp, nntp, wais, 
finger... the list goes on.[2]

I like Lynx a lot and I want it to be 
my go-to browser in the terminal for 
Gopher, Gemini, and the web. So in the 
absence of built-in Gemini support, I 
browse Gemini sites through Michael 
Lazar's great SmolNet Portal at 
portal.mozz.us.

Until yesterday, Lynx suffered from a 
minor compatibility problem with the 
portal. While the portal rendered 
gemtext line breaks properly in other 
browsers, the line breaks were not 
recognized by Lynx, which displayed a 
wall of unbroken text.

So I opened an issue on Michael 
Lazar's Github page for 
gemini-portal[3] and he fixed the 
problem by the end of the day, 
switching from css-based line-breaking 
to inserting the html <br> tag into 
gemini documents. He also explained 
how to change a setting in Lynx to 
make it render the <br> tag better. In 
the lynx.cfg file (at 
/etc/lynx/lynx.cfg in Debian 12), 
uncomment COLLAPSE_BR_TAGS:TRUE and 
then change it to 
COLLAPSE_BR_TAGS:FALSE

I thought I'd spread the information 
and add a thank you to Michael Lazar. 
I've now raised two issues on Github 
that he's addressed and the other one 
was a lot more work: he upgraded 
pygopherd to Python 3.

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[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lynx-dev/2020-09/msg00007.html
[2] https://lynx.invisible-island.net/lynx_help/lynx_url_support.html
[3] https://github.com/michael-lazar/gemini-portal/issues/4