Re:CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
by xphos on Thursday February 05, 2026 @11:12AM
(#46901224)
Gosh that actually sounds a amazing I am always annoyed that I have to leave terminal so much to explore I can understand the common person being daunted by that but a terminal accessible browser client sounds lovely for a lot of use cases
[ Parent
| on HN ]
I'm pretty nostalgic for Gopher. If the graphical web hadn't been so mind blowing I would have realized how great it was at the time. Before the web had graphical browser I thought it was pretty useless compared to gopher.
Re:CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
by pseudalopex on Thursday February 05, 2026 @11:23AM
(#46901340)
TUI web browsers exist. But many sites are not usable.
Gemini is a newer protocol influenced by Gopher.[1]
For Gopher, I used to use a little terminal browser called Phetch:
https://github.com/xvxx/phetch
It's written in Golang and was last updated in 2022. There's a GIF on the Github page to give a feel of what Phetch & browsing Gopher in the terminal is like. I mostly use the Lagrange GUI client though, which is fantastic.
Gopher still exists. If you're starting out, you can get your own "gopherhole" and Unix shell account at https://sdf.org/ It's a long time since I updated mine, but I'm at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/syneryder/
This makes me wonder if someone is putting the latest version of the Factbook on Gopher now. It might be a fun little project?
PS. Lagrange is a beautiful piece of software.
I kinda of remember when Mosaic supported all the protocols. One would just replace http with whatever protocol wanted to connect to the host with.
gopher:// or ftp://
Lynx supports gopher [0] and check out Bombadillo [1], it's a stripped down "small web" (gopher, gemini, finger) only terminal browser.
Gopher is sort of like Latin, it's a dead protocol, but is still useful.
0. https://lynx.invisible-island.net/lynx_help/lynx_url_support...