vtndb

A VT-100 front-end for the Nth Dimensional Borders Wiki. You will need a VT-100 compatible physical serial terminal to use this! If you're familiar with the source wiki, this navigates and behaves almost identically in every way.

Source Wiki this pulls from: https://echodolls.com/lore/

Check out a short video demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHgMCN_gBNQ

What works (basically everything):

• Direct page navigation with "goto", loading the homepage with "home", loading the default page of the current domain with "root".
• Following links using "!" syntax, navigating to the previous page with "back", navigating up with "cd ..".
• Navigating to random pages on the current domain using "random".
• Displaying local command help using the "help" command, including page-specific help.
• Interacting with special pages, such as the wiki search, calendars and dictionary pages.
• Full editing of commands using arrow keys, backspace and all alphanumeric inputs on the VT-100.
• Scrolling with the arrow keys as well as page up with "prev", page down with "next", top of page with "top" and bottom of page with "bottom".
• Link highlighting, map drawing and box drawing are mapped to VT-100 character sets as closely as possible.

Running This

If you are non-technical, or you just want to try it out without tinkering, I recommend using pipx to install vtndb. For help and instruction on setting up pipx on your computer, visit pipx's installation page. If you have pipx installed already, run the following line to install vtndb on your computer.

pipx install git+https://github.com/DragonMinded/vtndb.git

Once that completes, run this wiki frontend by typing the following line:

vtndb

You can also run with --help, like the following example, to see all options:

vtndb --help

Note that original VT-100 terminals, and variants such as the 101 and 102, need the XON/XOFF flow control option enabled. Make sure you enable flow control on the terminal itself, and then use the --flow argument to avoid overloading the terminal. Newer terminals such as mid-80s VT-100 clones often do not suffer from this problem and keep up just fine.

Development

To get started, first install the requirements using a command similar to:

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 -m pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Then, you can run the application similar to:

python3 vtndb

You can also run with --help, like the following example, to see all options:

python3 vtndb --help