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High speed, low drag command line Gopher client
Ever since 2018
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/// About
VF-1 is a command line client for the Gopher protocol, written in Python. It
features a unique and minimalistic user interface designed to facilitate rapid
keyboard-driven navigation of Gopherspace. It also boasts world-beating support
for non-ASCII charactersets and ANSI colour codes.
VF-1 was developed by Solderpunk with substantial contributions from Alex
Schroeder (aka Kensanata) and little bits of help from a few other helpful
Gopherspace folk - see the top of the vf1.py source file for all contributors.
/// Installation
VF-1 is installable via pip, with the command `pip install VF-1` (note the
uppercase and hyphen).
VF-1 has also been packaged for the Debian and Ubuntu distributions of GNU/Linux
and can be installed on machines running these distributions using `apt install
vf1` or `apt-get install vf1` (note the lowercase and lack of hyphen). Please
note that the latest release packaged by your OS may not be the latest release
available from PyPi via pip.
By design, VF-1 consists of a single .py file and has no mandatory dependencies
beyond the Python standard library (although the `chardet` library will be used
if available). So if for any reason you are unable to use `pip` or `apt`, you
can just drop a copy of vf1.py in ~/bin or anywhere else in your $PATH without
worrying about "proper installation" and it will Just Work.
TEXT Grab the latest vf1.py file here
If you are reading this page via a web proxy and do not have a Gopher client
already installed to download the file above, you can also get a local copy of
vf1.py by cloning the git repository (see below).
/// Code
VF-1 development happens in the git repo at https://git.sr.ht/~solderpunk/VF-1.
You can run `git clone https://git.sr.ht/~solderpunk/VF-1` to get a local copy.
VF-1 code was previously hosted at https://github.com/solderpunk/VF-1 but this
repository is deprecated as of November 2024 and will not be used any more.
/// Documentation
The VF-1 git repository contains two man pages, `vf1`(1) and `vf1-tutorial`(7),
but if you installed VF-1 with pip then the man pages won't have been installed
(pip doesn't support it). If you installed VF-1 via your operating systems's
packaging system, the may have been. You can always install them manually
after cloning the repository (see above), but for your convenience there are
versions of both pages formatted as 70 column ASCII documents available here:
TEXT vf1(1) - documents all command line options and VF-1 commands
TEXT vf1-tutoral(7) - gentle introduction to basic usage, with examples
/// Release history
* v1.0.0 - 2024-12-30
* v0.0.12 - 2024-10-20
* v0.0.11 - 2019-06-09
* v0.0.10 - 2018-04-09
* v0.0.9 - 2018-04-03
* v0.0.8 - 2018-04-01
* v0.0.7 - 2018-04-01
* v0.0.6 - 2018-03-04
* v0.0.5 - 2018-01-29
* v0.0.4 - 2018-01-29
* v0.0.3 - 2018-01-23
* v0.0.2 - 2018-01-20
* v0.0.1 - 2018-01-20
/// Trivia
VF-1 is named after the ficticious "VF-1 Valkyrie aerospace fighter mecha" from
the 1980s anime series Macross (adapted as "Robotech" in the West). The name
was chosen as a tribute not the series, but to the SDF public access unix
system, which began life as a Macross fan BBS. SDF was, at the time, the go-to
place to get free public Gopher hosting. Perhaps it still is, but there are
more and IMHO better places now, thanks to the emergence of the Tildeverse and
similar projects. Nevertheless, SDF undoubtedly played a decisive role in
keeping Gopherspace alive into the 21st century, and we should all be grateful
for that.
If you enjoy VF-1's user interface, you might care to know that there is a
Gemini client named AV-98 which has essentially the same look and feel:
HTML Check out AV-98 at tildegit.org