[1]: https://sr.ht/~mort/coffeepaste/

E.G,

curl https://dotfilehub.com/knoebber/emacs

results in plain text

    curl https://fuse.pl/beton/10print.html # with code highlighting

    curl https://fuse.pl/beton/cegla.html # just prose

  while True: print(choice("\\/"), end="")

Al Sweigart has a repository of "scroll art" similar to 10 print that might interest you: https://github.com/asweigart/scrollart

Thanks!

How does the server know what characters to send so that my specific command line interprets it in a nice way? Sorry if I'm not being very articulate.

EDIT: doesn't work when piping to less.

> EDIT: doesn't work when piping to less.

try -R

works :-)

Terminal emulation is a spooking place full of ancient magic. One of the reasons why I assumed "modern defaults". It would turn "a weekend hack" into a session of misery. ;)

What if you pass '-r' to less? (I can't verify myself because it worked without -r for me)

Example, rather than https://mahdi.blog/raw/raw-permalinks-for-accessibility/, it would be https://mahdi.blog/raw-permalinks-for-accessibility.raw

It's a minor nitpick really, but I quite like this idea! I think I'll try to implement this for my website too.

As for the other people here wondering why User Agents weren't used for this:

- Using static website hosting goes out the window, which is quite a shame because it makes everything so much easier

- User agents are pretty terrible for determining capabilities and intent (what if someone was using curl to get an actual webpage?)

- It will never cover all types of HTTP clients (a whitelist is pretty terrible as we have seen from various online services restricting Firefox users or Linux users from certain features for no other reason than their user agents weren't in the list the developers used to check for the presence of certain features).

I never understand comments like these. Now if my terminal is 78 characters it is a mess or if it is 100 characters it is wasting space. If you just don't wrap the lines my terminal does it at the right width.

Hard wrapping doesn't work well. You need to know the target width to wrap and you don't know that until someone actually opens the file. Every viewer I have ever tried is excellent at soft-wrapping. Let it do its thing.

This is possible with HTML and CSS, but not in plaintext. I think wasted space is something I can handle, but a badly wrapped code is something I dislike.

Just tried it on a vintage early-80's 40-column terminal, and works better than I expected. I thought that a lot of words would be cut off on the right side, but the wrapping was about 90% correct. Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but this is what happened just now.

I find it easier to read this way rather than have wrapping turned on. Wrapping isn't nearly as good for my comprehension as a line break after 80 chars.

Different people have different preferences

lynx -dump <regular URL>

elinks -dump <regular URL>

(not the same thing of course, but it doesn't require anything from the server other than reasonable HTML)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

If the site is not a static one, you could check the request's User Agent server-side, and return the raw version directly (or redirect to /foo/raw) if the UA contains 'curl' or 'wget'.

If the site is static and you are able & willing to change your vhost config, you could detect the UA too, and redirect to /foo/raw.

Just a few ideas. This is a fun little project you've got here. Well done.

https://apitman.com/19/#netcatable

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/software/

1: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/kineto/

(i do this for my blog, anachronauts.club/~voidstar. i kind of hate gemini-the-protocol, but love gemtext-as-default and love having a space where text-forward content reigns.)

Here’s how to make it pretty-ish: https://github.com/dbohdan/caddy-markdown-site

Serving just the markdown as plaintext to e.g. Lynx is straightforward.

Discussion here:

https://caddy.community/t/markdown-support-in-v2/6984/12

ideally we'll tweak our gemini-to-http proxy to look at the client's "Accept:" header (as suggested in other comments on the op) to decide whether to reply with raw gemtext or converted html-with-css. then a www browser receives light formatting, curl receives raw gemtext, and gemini browsers format however they like.

There are some problems with using Accept header (although you can use it as a start; if you can implement it, then you might do so). Even if it is mentioned in the Accept header, servers will not necessarily understand it, and if a lot of file formats are implemented then it can make the Accept header very long, knowing properly the preference, trying to explicitly download the raw file or a specific other format (regardless of the Accept header), and other problems, etc.

(My idea is a Interpreter response header, although this requires that web browsers will implement it.)

Edit: fixed it by moving the script to its own file.

Example:

curl https://mahdi.blog/raw/self-hosted/ | less

  LESS(1)

       --mouse
              Enables mouse input: scrolling the mouse wheel down moves
              forward in the file, scrolling the mouse wheel up moves
              backwards in the file, and clicking the mouse sets the "#"
              mark to the line where the mouse is clicked.  The number
              of lines to scroll when the wheel is moved can be set by
              the --wheel-lines option.  Mouse input works only on
              terminals which support X11 mouse reporting, and on the
              Windows version of less.

  5. Using the mouse                                      *mouse-using*

  Don't forget to enable the mouse with this command: >
          :set mouse=a
  Otherwise Vim won't recognize the mouse in all modes (See 'mouse').

  Currently the mouse is supported for Unix in an xterm window, in a *BSD
  console with |sysmouse|, in a Linux console (with GPM |gpm-mouse|), for
  MS-DOS and in a Windows console.

                                                          *xterm-mouse-wheel*

  To use the mouse wheel in a new xterm you only have to make the scroll wheel
  work in your Xserver, as mentioned above.

EDIT: typo fixings.

[1]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow

I'm guessing the blog is made by a static site generator, so the above is harder than it seems. I suppose one could add a reverse proxy that redirects to /raw/$PAGE when it sees "curl".

https://gohugo.io/templates/output-formats/