thisago's blog

Rethinking Stuff

Table of Contents

Recently my mind is adapting to a better environment. I am a terminal-first user for a while, but with the (pleasing) adoption of chawan , my willing to abandon the GUIs increased.

Seriously, take a look to this awesome simplicity, chawan's configuration writes the history as plain text and bookmarks as a markdown bullet list, allowing me to commit them without any workaround!

diff --git a/history.uri b/history.uri
index 87a2ea2..1142328 100644
--- a/history.uri
+++ b/history.uri
@@ -122,7 +122,6 @@ http://localhost:3000/announcement/20230919-htmlAntiCopy
 https://codeberg.org/thisago/blog
 https://codeberg.org/thisago/blog/actions
 https://codeberg.org/thisago/blog/actions/runs/19/jobs/0/attempt/1
-file:///home/user/Documents/repos/chawan%2Duser/bookmarks.md
 https://blog.thisago.com/announcement/20230919-htmlAntiCopy.html
 ddg:enable Caret Browsing in as default js
 https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/?kp=-1&kd=-1&q=enable%20Caret%20Browsing%20in%20as%20default%20js
@@ -182,5 +181,20 @@ gopher://alexkarle.com:70/0/server.txt
 gopher://bitreich.org/1/scm/geomyidae
 https://alexkarle.com/blog/exploring-plan9.html
 https://alexkarle.com/
-gopher://alexkarle.com/1/
 file:///home/user/Documents/repos/chawan-user/bookmarks.md
+gopher://alexkarle.com:70/0/blog/state-of-the-cloud-2022-09.txt
+gopher://alexkarle.com:70/1/records
+gopher://alexkarle.com:70/0/records/why.txt
+gopher://alexkarle.com:70/1/bin
+https://git.alexkarle.com/
+https://git.alexkarle.com/alexkarle.com/log.html
+https://git.alexkarle.com/alexkarle.com/commit/e5ee1edb2a9fdb0808c0cb3fecb43bb7bfbc9724.html
+https://git.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan
+gopher://alexkarle.com/1
+gopher://alexkarle.com/1/
+gopher://alexkarle.com:70/0/blog/a-new-hope.txt
+gopher://alexkarle.com:70/1/jam-tuesday
+gopher://alexkarle.com:70/1/blog
+gopher://alexkarle.com:70/0/blog/my-old-man.txt
+https://alexkarle.com/blog/burrowing.html
+file:///home/user/Documents/repos/chawan%2Duser/bookmarks.md

This is like "achievement completed" for internet browsing!

Gopher parallel reality

With chawan I found the world of gopher, and even learned that lynx supports it (by the way, would be great support to gopher at eww in Emacs).

All this stuff is changing my ideals, and the focus in plain-text is increasing, the bloat-free content is amazing.

I got excited when I recalled that Solene (which I recommend a lot her content) had a gopher website. The thoughts started to structure convictions and ideals, I realized this thing is for me.

But the inspiration to write this (instead to sleep xD) came from this awesome content: gopher://alexkarle.com:70/0/blog/burrowing.txt (http). "The Pitch" section is simply awesome, you should take a look by yourself.

The gopher simplicity inspired him to rewrite his blog in mdoc! Highly inspiring, it even made me consider to do the same at the time of the reading.

But I like Emacs, and until now, I am (very) happy with Org, but I realized the need to be cautious to avoid it make my blog1 bloated, because Org is a powerful tool (maybe exceedingly LOL).

After the last publications I did here (adaption of old posts), the blog build time increased: Nim packages needed to be installed, Nim being compiled to JavaScript for a interactive feature… And the JS stuff doesn't works in a simplistic browser as eww or lynx, and for some reason didn't even worked on chawan (but someday I want to contribute to this awesome project, it's awesome to use a well maintained Nim app!).

Next steps

I had found Alex's website at sourcehut just after registering there. I liked.

I'm considering now to test a self hosted sourcehut, and compare a little with Fogejo, which is awesome but not so optimized for non-JS and navigation in lighter browsers as chawan as sourcehut is.

I didn't liked the decisions at sourcehut to not support Org and other markups but maybe it's my mind that is adapted to a plug-and-play that (mainly) GitHub did onto me.

I am also considering to contribute at Forgejo to improve the UI for chawan (as such avoiding popups). But the next steps depends now on my conclusions on the self hosted sourcehut.

Conclusion

This is mostly a reminder to keep myself clean from the "pretty-looking" bloat.

Git send-email and mail lists caught me, and now I need to dive into this bubble :)

Footnotes:

1

This word is not the best thing for my website. I just don't call it "website" because I want to host more things in this domain, and "website" seems to be "main thing"…

See the source code here.
Generated at 2025-11-02 Sun 21:38 by Emacs 29.4 (Org mode 9.6.15)