Saying Offpunk 2.0

by Ploum on 2023-11-25

I’m comfortable to announce the discharge, final week, of Offpunk 2.0.

Offpunk is an offline-first command-line browser/RSS reader. You management it by typing command and it maintains a cache of all of the networked sources to will let you entry them offline indefinitely.

If a non-cached useful resource is tentatively accessed, the URL is marked as to be fetched later. Operating periodically “offpunk –sync” will fetch these sources and add them to your “tour” to remind you that you just wished to entry it.

Screenshot

Switching the license to AGPLv3

Offpunk initially began as a department then a pleasant fork of AV-98. It was referred to as AV-98-offline and, as such, shared the identical BSD license.

Throughout a number of discussions, Solderpunk and I got here to the conclusion that AV-98-offline was turning into too completely different from the preliminary aim of AV-98. It was thus renamed Offpunk. On the identical time, I grew more and more satisfied that we wanted extra copyleft software program and that the AGPL license was higher suited to guard the commons.

As a symbolic transfer, I’ve thus determined to modify Offpunk license from BSD to AGPLv3 however wanted a chance to take action. The two.0 launch is such a chance.

A number of impartial instruments

Like AV-98, Offpunk was one single large python file. I favored the simplicity of it. Nevertheless it actually turned a large number and I wished to supply Offpunk’s options as separate command-line device. With Offpunk 2.0, you’ll thus have three new command-line instruments:

– netcache : when given a URL, will obtain and cache this URL or solely entry the cache if the “–offline” choice is offered.
– ansicat : will render an HTML, an RSS, a Gemtext or perhaps a image in your terminal, with varied choices.
– opnk : common opener. Will attempt to render any file or any URL in your terminal. If it fails, it is going to fallback to xdg-open.

These three instructions ought to include a person web page and a “–help” however they’re nonetheless fairly new. To my very own shock, I discovered myself utilizing “opnk” on a regular basis. I don’t assume anymore about the way to deal with a file, I merely give it to opnk.

Packaging these instruments was quite a bit tougher than anticipated and I wish to thank all of the contributors to this work, together with Austreelis, David Zaslavsky and Jean Abou Samra.

Themes

The aim of Offpunk, via Ansicat, is to render net, RSS, gemini and gopher pages as colored ANSI textual content in your terminal. Till now, these colors had been hardcoded. With 2.0, they are often customised. See “assist theme”.

In offpunk, customisation might be made everlasting by including all of the instructions you wish to run at startup in your .config/offpunk/offpunkrc file. Mine accommodates one single line: “offline”, guaranteeing I exploit Offpunk solely in offline mode.

See Also

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Getting began

Utilizing Offpunk day by day as your primary shopping/rss driver takes some studying. You might want to get used to the Offpunk philosophy: including parts to tour as an alternative of clicking them, creating lists to learn later, doing a day by day synchronisation. It isn’t trivial.

The “assist” command will in all probability be your finest allies. The group additionally present help on a person devoted mailing-list.

If Offpunk turns into helpful to you, the group is open. Contributions, documentation, weblog put up about how you utilize Offpunk, assist to new customers and packaging are warmly welcome. Generally, easy suggestions is all it takes to make a developer comfortable. So don’t hesitate to contribute in considered one of our lists.

I’ve additionally began an experimental Matrix room on #offpunk:matrix.org. I’ve the idea that mailing-list is best fitted to discussions however I’m giving this the good thing about doubt and keen to discover whether or not or not direct real-time dialogue may assist new customers.