ANNOUNCING OFFPUNK 2.0
by Ploum on 2023-11-25
https://ploum.net/2023-11-25-offpunk2.html
I’m happy to announce the release, last week, of Offpunk 2.0.
Offpunk is an offline-first command-line browser/RSS reader. You control
it by typing command and it maintains a cache of all the networked
resources to allow you to access them offline indefinitely.
If a non-cached resource is tentatively accessed, the URL is marked as
to be fetched later. Running periodically "offpunk --sync" will fetch
those resources and add them to your "tour" to remind you that you
wanted to access it.
Offpunk official website
https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/
Offpunk 2.0 changelog
https://git.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/refs/v2.0
List of available offpunk packages
https://repology.org/project/offpunk/versions
Screenshot
==========
Mandatory screenshot showing Offpunk browsing Offpunk’s website. There’s
a screenshot of Offpunk in the screenshot.
https://ploum.net/files/offpunk2.png
Switching the license to AGPLv3
===============================
Offpunk originally started as a branch then a friendly fork of AV-98. It
was called AV-98-offline and, as such, shared the same BSD license.
AV-98, the first Gemini browser
https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/AV-98
During multiple discussions, Solderpunk and I came to the conclusion
that AV-98-offline was becoming too different from the initial goal of
AV-98. It was thus renamed Offpunk. At the same time, I grew
increasingly convinced that we needed more copyleft software and that
the AGPL license was better suited to protect the commons.
"We need more of Richard Stallman, not less", my take on why copyleft is
important
https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html
As a symbolic move, I’ve thus decided to switch Offpunk license from BSD
to AGPLv3 but needed an opportunity to do so. The 2.0 release is such an
opportunity.
Multiple independent tools
==========================
Like AV-98, Offpunk was one single big python file. I liked the
simplicity of it. But it really became a mess and I wanted to offer
Offpunk’s features as separate command-line tool. With Offpunk 2.0, you
will thus have three new command-line tools:
- netcache : when given a URL, will download and cache this URL or only
access the cache if the "--offline" option is provided.
- ansicat : will render an HTML, an RSS, a Gemtext or even a picture in
your terminal, with various options.
- opnk : universal opener. Will try to render any file or any URL in
your terminal. If it fails, it will fallback to xdg-open.
Those three commands should come with a man page and a "--help" but they
are still quite new. To my own surprise, I found myself using "opnk" all
the time. I don’t think anymore about how to handle a file, I simply
give it to opnk.
Packaging those tools was a lot harder than expected and I want to thank
all the contributors to this work, including Austreelis, David Zaslavsky
and Jean Abou Samra.
Themes
======
The goal of Offpunk, through Ansicat, is to render web, RSS, gemini and
gopher pages as coloured ANSI text in your terminal. Until now, those
colours were hardcoded. With 2.0, they can be customised. See "help
theme".
Screenshot of Offpunk customised with the worst possible colours I could
find.
https://ploum.net/files/offpunk2_theme.png
In offpunk, customisation can be made permanent by adding all the
commands you want to run at startup in your .config/offpunk/offpunkrc
file. Mine contains one single line: "offline", ensuring I use Offpunk
only in offline mode.
Getting started
===============
Using Offpunk daily as your main browsing/rss driver takes some
learning. You need to get used to the Offpunk philosophy: adding
elements to tour instead of clicking them, creating lists to read later,
doing a daily synchronisation. It is not trivial.
The "help" command will probably be your best allies. The community also
provide support on a user dedicated mailing-list.
Offpunk-users mailing list
https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-users
If Offpunk becomes useful to you, the community is open. Contributions,
documentation, blog post about how you use Offpunk, help to new users
and packaging are warmly welcome. Sometimes, simple feedback is all it
takes to make a developer happy. So don’t hesitate to contribute in one
of our lists.
Offpunk-devel mailing list
https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-devel
Offpunk-packagers mailing list
https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-packagers
I’ve also started an experimental Matrix room on #offpunk:matrix.org. I
have the belief that mailing-list is better suited for discussions but
I’m giving this the benefit of doubt and willing to explore whether or
not direct real-time discussion could help new users.
Join the #offpunk:matrix.org room
https://matrix.to/#/#offpunk:matrix.org
THE GIFT OF TIME
by Ploum on 2023-11-10
https://ploum.net/2023-11-10-the-gift-of-time.html
Maintaining a free software project is spending years of your life to
solve a problem that would have taken several hours or even days without
the software.
Which is, joke aside, an incredible contribution to the common good.
The time saved is multiplied by the number of users and quickly
compound. They are saving time without the need to exchange their own
time.
Free software offers free time, free life extension to many human living
now and maybe in the future.
Instead of contributing to the economy, free software developers
contribute to humanity. To the global progress.
Free software is about making our short lifetimes a common good instead
of an economical product.
