offpunk is my new favorite browser

I’ve been touring various clients, but not many support client certs. This has kept me using Amfora and Lagrange, and made me wish I knew how to get Bollux to use a client cert. Lack of cert support in other clients is why I haven’t been using Bubble except to read posts. Since Amfora is a finished product and the author is done playing with Gemini, I’m kind of looking for something new anyway. The UI for the TUI version of Lagrange is far too heavy for me. And the graphical Lagrange keeps crashing. I’ll describe that better below, after I mention certs in Offpunk.

Offpunk supports certs

The help text was a little confusing. You can use the built-in help certs and see that it does support certs. You can generate them, but I copied over my lagrange and amfora identities. Certs can be placed in a directory such as ~/.local/share/offpunk/certs/<site>/. Here, the <site> is the host name part of the URL you’re visiting. There are some caveats:

key must be named something.key
cert must match the something and be named something.cert
using a cert requires accessing the site with a URL like something@site

That something is apparently supposed to be a user name. Lagrange uses some kind of hash. And for my hand generated certs I had actually named it whatever the site was where I wanted to use it. But user names makes sense.

User jmcs from the Gemini XMPP (or irc?) mentions they put the user name in their bookmarks. That’s a pretty good tip.

Bugs in Existing Clients

Amfora glitches

I get weird artifacts while using Amfora. It’s a bit like screen tearing where a character from one line will overlap another. Except it’s hard to predict and it will even happen without any scrolling. It’s bad enough that I think I’m seeing typos in my posts, but it can be downright difficult to read pages.

I should grab a screenshot of the Settings page on Bubble or my profile page. It made it look like I had typos in my profile.

Lagrange crashing

I haven’t figured out if it’s just on my arm-based system, but I get frequent crashes in Lagrange under Wayland on my Asahi Linux (NixOS) M1 laptop. Almost every time I try to copy something via Ctrl+C it will crash with the following:

Lagrange: A Beautiful Gemini Client
X Error of failed request:  BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  18 (X_ChangeProperty)
  Resource id in failed request:  0x200030
  Serial number of failed request:  1155
  Current serial number in output stream:  1157

Sometimes I can get away with a single copy command right after launching, but after that it will crash.

Anyway

I’ll probably make a few more notes on the use of Offpunk. It’s a bit different than other software I’ve used, but similar enough in presentation that I’m really liking it.

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