Comment by 🚀 sy

=> Re: "What would you want to see in a desktop GUI Gemini client?..." | In: s/Geminispace

For me, text rendering with complex scripts support and integration with the OS mechanisms are the most important features a GUI browser must have.

By OS mechanisms, I mean passing the whole or a selection of content to other programs for things like dictionary lookup, text to speech, note taking etc. That is, at least on macOS, the ability to use the system services or shortcuts.app and other platform facilities.

Also accessibility might be a necessity for some. I use TTS as a convenience, but folks may depend on it. This is also kind of a litmus test for OS integration. For example, Lagrange (the gold standard of smolweb browsers) can only speak the first paragraph (customarily the header) and the site name, and I have to use manual copy-paste for things.

These days terminal emulators display images and can replace most GUI apps by basic scripting. But although mainly text based, they still cannot accurately render text as good as GUIs. When I checked last year, iced (using cosmic) was rendering text better than other light alternatives. But integrating that text content with the OS was a hassle.

In the rust ecosystem, using tauri may be a viable alternative. It uses the system webview, and solves those hard problems by default. A major drawback of it, is that its target community seems to be JS and web developers. And trying to use pure rust may be adding bloat to the final executable. For size comparison, a tauri app (without JS) I put together in a couple of hours:

37M target/debug/laika
13M target/release/laika

That includes basic HTTP/HTML support using fivefilters configs (embedding around 7M of site configs) with readability algorithm fallback (but fails for sites that are behind cloudflare). But lacks all browser features other than getting the content and rendering.

=> 🚀 sy

Jan 15 · 4 days ago

3 Later Comments ↓

=> 🦂 zzo38 · Jan 15 at 03:22:

If by "page search", you mean to search within a single document, then I agree and I forgot to mention that.

About porting certificates between computers with a digest file and import/export, I wrote a document with my ideas about a file format which could be used for such a thing (you can write comments/complaints about it):

=> — https://github.com/zzo38/scorpion/blob/trunk/misc/certconfig.doc

=> 🚀 peteyboy · Jan 15 at 05:44:

zz038 yes, I meant 'in-page search' or page search

=> 🚀 peteyboy · Jan 15 at 05:46:

for* page search, sigh I'm glad you agree! :)

Original Post

=> 🌒 s/Geminispace

What would you want to see in a desktop GUI Gemini client? What do you wish your favorite client did, that it doesn't do, and why? All idea's welcome!

=> 💬 Acidus · 33 comments · 1 like · Jan 13 · 6 days ago