Date: 2023-05-27
Last update: 2024-11-17

God's favorite toolkit, UNIX, xterm, vi, Gopher, IRC
----------------------------------------------------

Why? No nostalgia. I did not use UNIX, IRC, Gopher, Usenet, BBS,
Linux, BSD 20 years ago. I used Windows, any browser, probably gmail
and any other mostly random provider for whatever else I used.

I had no idea about UNIX tools, about God's garden built into a
terminal interface with plain text and God's tools like vi text
editor, Internet Relay Chat, Gopher and similar.

Maybe I randomly tried some Ubuntu live CD and felt a bit cool for
an hour during a weekend. I don't really remember.

So I did not come to these immortal and powerful, terminal friendly
tools playing together God's game in OpenBSD from some feelings of
good old times. Well, it was a wonderful time even without those
utilities. Life was different 20 or 30 years ago.

So why then I am writting this text file on OpenBSD operating system
with vi text editor inside of /var/gopher directory?
Some hype, new cool thing? Somebody somewhere did recommend it?
None of this. I am here naturally. I use these gorgeous tools as part
of my lifestyle. It's my path. I love freedom, truth and simplicity.

It is not a hobby, not a job or a business. It's my life. It's part of
it. I try to eat healthy and live without any junk, chemical products
in my life. The same applies to my online life.
My life is simple, offline, online.

I touched Gopher very slighty some time ago. It did not resonate with
me at that time, like IRC or UNIX 20 years ago.

I did not dig deeper that time. I probably visited a few well known
big gophers, which are all outdated, broken and full of crap. So one
does not get impressed at first sight probably.

This time I did not care what other gophers are out there. I read
carefully RFC 1436 - The Internet Gopher Protocol. I fell in love
with it. I knew that Gopher is the right tool for me. I quickly
checked what Gopher server software and client I can install on my
fresh OpenBSD server, installed it and started to experimenting,
learning.

It was just few weeks after I installed the server and built my
website. There were already some signs that HTML/CSS would not be my
best friend. I searched a lot for how to make it simple, as close to
plain text as possible. I checked mandoc tools, perlpod and searched
for similar, very simple utilities. I end up with the uncomplicated
solution. It was HTML/CSS and the whole website was in <pre> tags.
I already knew basic HTML/CSS so it was pretty fast and smooth for me.
This allowed me to make it practically plain text with a helpful web
things such as hyperlinks, menus and so on.

I was not satisfied. Still not simple enough for my soul.
Then The Great Gopher found me and allowed me to jump in. It was
liberating. I feel when things click in my life.

As my life and everything around me has to be as simple as possible,
later on this route, I demolished my original website and kept it
there just as a placeholder with the Gopher HTTP proxy for some time.
Bots hitting my server over port 80 for no reason is not charming.

During my journey in Gopher space I simplified my Great Gopher server
several times. Now it should be almost in the state as intended by
the Gopher God, the menu with text files. Nothing exotic around.
I admit, there are still few things that can be in better shape.

I enjoy the original Gopher client from the University of Minnesota.
It has great key binding, it's simple, it has all the features I found 
useful in Gopher and it does not have much stupidity outside of
Gopher+ feature creep. This one probably does not allow to visit
a gopher server directly without typing the "gopher://" protocol
prefix. I did not find yet any better and joyful, easy to use Gopher
client for my garden party with the Great Gopher.

Gopher space is small garden, without millions worms and flowers.
One person, one server can have big impact on the whole Gopher world.

Install, setup, manage, write and read content in the Gopher is easy,
simple and blissful. There is almost no distraction. Just some
"standard" and your intelligence to make your Gopher server shine.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

One human can't change the world. One person can change himself,
inspire others, change something small close to him. That something
can then change something bigger and more far. It will go up until
the reality will change everywhere.
.