Gemini Cheatsheet

If you're fully in gemspace, you've probably already read some of the Gemini documentation (such as the FAQ and the Gemini Quickstart), which is generally well-written (sometimes extraordinarily so) and does generally offer concise information, and you certainly have some sort of interface/client, but this is most of the stuff that helped me most and I found it convenient to bring several documents into even more concise connection to refer to and maybe others will, too. (Also, some of the places and things referred to in the otherwise better, fuller documentation aren't always extant or responsive whereas everything here was as of the revision date.)

Reading

Gemini clients

The FAQ addresses getting a client:

I heartily recommand:

Finding stuff

The FAQ addresses many ways to find stuff on Gemini to read.

Search engines are probably the simplest and most familiar and the ones that I found were active and most useful are

There are also several good aggregators such as

HTTP proxy

If there are websites you can't live without (for me, I want some conventional news and sports) but you want to avoid the net directly, the FAQ addresses this.

I opened Lagrange and went to File>Preferences>Network and typed 'stargate.gemi.dev:1994' into 'HTTP Proxy: " and was good to go.

Writing

Gemtext

There is an official introduction to gemtext and a shorter "cheatsheet."

Here is an even shorter cheatsheet:

Long lines are not broken, short lines are not joined, blank lines are not collapsed. Write paragraphs in long lines. The following strings, if at the start of a line and generally followed by whitespace, are significant:

• > blockquote
• # header 1
• ## header 2
• ### header 3
• => link (followed by an optional label)
• ``` preformatted text (followed by an optional description and ended by another ``` line)
• * unordered (and un-nest-able) list

Clients may render the above any way they want (including not at all) but many will try to Do the Right Thing.

Gemtext subscriptions

There is an official loose description of Gemini subscriptions (a sort of Markdown for Atom).

Here is an even shorter one:

To write a gemtext page that can easily be subscribed to, include descriptive text after a '#' for your title. (An optional subtitle can be produced by including a '## subtitle' line immediately after the title.) For links you wish to be included in the feed, add a YYYY-MM-DD date (with optional separator) followed by its usual descriptive label. That's it. Example:

# Descriptively Titled Subscription
## An even more semantically questionable subtitle

=> foo.gmi Normal link ignored by subscription software
=> bar.gmi 1970-01-01 Link displayed as an entry by subscription software

Publishing

The FAQ addresses several methods of getting your content out:

I've had an account at a "pubnix" for years and they have a gemini server.

Finding another active and responsive gemini pubnix was a task, but I also signed up at tilde.pink and got access after a few days.

---

Page created: 2024-09-26

Last changed: 2024-10-02