v0.2.0-beta.1

lookit now opens on a startpage instead of an empty screen: a built-in catalog of finger communities and services, with your own bookmarks pinned above it. This beta also adds a panel for browsing the links found inside a response, and a help overlay that fits the terminal it's drawn in and will run the commands it lists.

The archives below are real builds, so nobody has to install Go to try it. This is a beta, so brew upgrade won't offer it and go install …@latest will skip it, both on purpose, so a prerelease can't reach anyone who didn't ask for it. Keybindings and layout may still change before v0.2.0.

Install

Download the archive for your platform below, unpack it, and move the lookit binary onto your PATH. No Go toolchain needed.

On macOS, fetch the archive with curl -L rather than clicking through in a browser. A browser download tags the file with com.apple.quarantine and macOS then refuses to run the unsigned binary; if that happens, xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./lookit clears it. The Homebrew cask normally handles this, and prereleases skip the cask.

Highlights

Startpage

Launching lookit now shows a browsable list under the target input. Press ↓ to move into it, ↵ to go to whatever's highlighted, i to get back to the input, and h to return to the startpage from anywhere. / filters the list on both the address and its description, so /weather finds services you'd otherwise have to remember the address of.

b bookmarks whatever you're looking at, wherever you are. On a user list b bookmarks the host, so drill into a person first if it's the person you want to keep.

Your bookmarks live in ~/.config/lookit/bookmarks (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lookit/bookmarks), one target per line, so you can edit them by hand. Add a line reading catalog off to hide the built-in catalog and see only your own. Rows you bookmarked yourself show when you last visited them, and lookit rewrites that date when you land on one.

The catalog is a starting point rather than a fixed list. If a community or service you use is missing, that's worth an issue.

Links

Responses often point at other places. L opens a list of the links lookit found in the response you're reading, and in the reader itself tab and shift+tab step through them one at a time. ↵ opens a link that's clearly a finger target, f fingers one that could be read either way, and y copies a web URL to your clipboard. Targets lifted from a server response are pinned to port 79, so a response can't steer you at some other service.

Help

? opens the key list for wherever you happen to be. It lays out in one to three columns depending on the width available, and while it's open you can press any key it shows to run that command.

Thanks

Outside contributions in this release:

• @ibobgunardi taught the renderer to highlight the standard finger fields, and then the Mail forwarded to line as well (#19, #35).
• @floze-the-genius stopped the startpage counting "1 entries" (#80).
• @MsfPablo kept a service row readable when its own token is a bare numeral, which had been indistinguishable from a list number under the tree connector (#104).
• @DmitriyRazgulyaev matched the filter prompt to lookit's own target: prompt (#131).

If you're in that list, or you asked for any of this, feedback on the beta would be very welcome.

Testing notes

Anything odd is worth an issue at https://github.com/jonathandeamer/lookit/issues. These are the areas that have produced real bugs so far, so they're the most useful places to be rough:

• Filtering. / works on the startpage, on a host's user list, and in the links panel. Typing a filter and hitting Enter quickly, before the list has caught up, is what shook out the worst bug fixed in this release.
• The bookmarks file. A line lookit can't understand should be reported to you rather than silently dropped or guessed at. Try breaking it, with bad dates and malformed targets, and see whether what it tells you makes sense.
• Terminal size and theme. 80 columns and light backgrounds get the most attention here; around 60 columns is where the layout starts stacking.
• Hosts that don't open as a user list. lookit declines to parse a response rather than guessing at it, so a host from your own travels that comes up as plain text where you expected a selectable list is a useful report. Say which host, and the response itself if you can.

Known issues in this beta

• g and G don't jump to the top or bottom of a response. Arrows, page keys, and j/k all scroll normally (#130).
• A user list filters on the login only, so filtering by someone's real name finds nothing even when that name is shown beside it (#117).
• The README doesn't cover the links panel yet, and the demo gif still shows v0.1.0 launching into an empty screen rather than the startpage. Both will be caught up before v0.2.0.

Known limits

• Read-only. lookit fingers servers; it doesn't host a .plan or answer queries.
• Finger only. No gopher, gemini, or web.
• The TUI needs a real terminal (TTY).

Builds

macOS and Linux, amd64 and arm64. Each archive bundles the binary, README.md, LICENSE, and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.