Looking at long stuff with VF-1

Tomasino recently asked me[1] how I view his phlog in my VF-1 client,

since it contains a lot of long menus and posts which don't fit on a

single screen. I answered him on IRC last night but figured I should

document my responses here in case anybody else was wondering, and

also because there are some newish ways to handle this problem that I

haven't well publicised yet that old-time VF-1 users might not be

aware of yet. So, here's my definitive guide to looking at long stuff

with VF-1.

In the case of very long menus (e.g. the gopher.club phlogosphere

listing), you should know that after you've visited a menu, entering a

blank line at the prompt, i.e. just hitting Enter, will display the

first 10 items in that menu, then the next 10 items after that each

time you hit it. This lets you gradually page through a long menu

that flowed off the top of your screen. Since normally in this

situation you just want to see the most recent entries (e.g. most

recently updated phlogs, or most recent posts, or whatever), just

whacking Enter once immediately after the long list has loaded is

enough. This is probably my most-often used solution, because it is

just a single keystroke and it quickly becomes a totally automatic

reflex.

Note that this only shows the selectors in the menu. The

informational lines are stripped out, just like with "ls". This

usually works fine, but there are certain HEATHENS in Gopherspace who

design menus with lots of informational lines providing essential

context to understand the menu and with meaningless, non-unique

selector names. VF-1's "ls" is not much use here. These people are

WRONG and Shai'hulud will come for them, but sometimes they write nice

stuff, so one has to be able to deal with it. Thus...

VF-1 has had a "less" command since the very beginning, but it

originally did not work on menus, only on "real content" (which is to

say anything with an item type other than 1). This was a frequent

source of complaint because of all the HEATHENS who serve their

content as item type 1. VF-1 was originally designed around a very

clean, elegant, beautiful (some might say "strict" or "pedantic")

conceptual model in which menus are menus and content is content, just

like directories and directories and files are files. I have caved on

this issue a bit, and now "less" and a bunch of other stuff also works

on menus, and so you can read long phlog posts by heathens just fine.

As a side effect, you can now also less through long menus like the

SDF phlog listing, which gives you an alternative to the blank-line

pagination technique outlined above, in case you don't like that for

some reason and would rather type 5 keystrokes instead of 1.

Finally, you can run "set auto_page true" (putting in your .vf1rc file

for persistence across sessions if you like it). This will display

menus which are 40 lines long or less normally (you can do e.g. "set

auto_page_threshold 60" if 40 lines is too short for you), but for

menus which are longer than 40 lines, after displaying the first 40 it

will stop (telling you that it has truncated a long menu) and then you

have to use the blank line pagination technique from the beginning of

this post in order to continue down through the rest of the menu.

When operating in this mode, informational lines from the first 40 (or

whatever) lines of the menu will be displayed, so you can still see

title ASCII art etc.), but when you page through the rest of the menu

they will be hidden, as per usual for blank-line pagination. Yeah, is

pretty ugly and hackish. I have this mode enabled by default in my

SDF .vf1rc but not in other places, and having lived like this for a

month or so, I don't really like the auto-pagination. It's pretty

ugly in the code as well, so I may remove it. If this sounds like

something you would like, please test it in the near future and if

you love it, let me know somehow, Otherwise it might disappear.

In related news, I have been playing with the sacc[2] gopher client

from the bitreich folks over at circumlunar.space, because VF-1 is *by

far* the most bloated thing that sees regular use over in that

beautiful RAM-constrained world of tiny tools. No matter how small

and sleek your Python application is, it still relies on the Python

interpreter, which is not a small thing. I'm thinking of learning

Lua or Go or some other language that is a nice match for

memory-constrained environments. But as for sacc, it certainly is

nice and light, but I have to say after months of VF-1 use, the idea

of having to actually move a kind of cursor item-by-item up or down

through menus to get to where I want to be feels like trying to run

through molasses or something! Also I seem to have hit some weird bug

where I can't select the second item in any menu? I need to look into

that. I assume it is some odd quirk of my environment, because it is

such a glaring bug that if it happened for everybody it would surely

have been spotted and fixed by now.

[1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180322-a-question-for-solderpunk

[2] gopher://bitreich.org:70/1/scm/sacc