alt Hacker NewsOP here and Vim/UNIX fan.
I get the idea behind "reinventing Emacs".
But there are main differences:
- offpunk is an offline content browser/reader. Main component is fetching/caching/displaying ressources
- offpunk is developed as a set of components that can be used separately (openk, ansicat, netcache)
- offpunk delegates as much as possible to other UNIX tools (less for browsing/reading, chafa for images, grep to find in a page, $EDITOR for editing needs )
- offpunk is pure CLI tool. You type commands, results is displayed in your terminal or in less. There’s no "keyboard shortcuts" or "environment". It is a prompt on which you type commands
- There’s no "configuration" in offpunk. The only (but powerful) way on configuring is having offpunk launch commands at starts (commands listed in offpunkrc). So no "configuration language" or syntax or plugins or whatever.
- last but not least: basic use of Offpunk is simple. You are not required to learn much and you use only what you want. Lot of Offpunks users don’t use the Web/HTTP part and use it as a straight Gemini browser (for the record, Offpunk is a fork of AV-98, the very first Gemini browser)
My intention wasn't to compare software but rather paradigms; Gnus is only relevant here because it unifies email, feeds and news into a single UI. In other words, the human user sees everything as generic "posts" an approach not unlike many Nostr clients, to name something modern. It's the paradigm of saying "in the end, what matters is the message". As long as there's a readable amount of them, you don't need anything else; when they reach a certain volume, well, you need to be able to "filter" them somehow so that some are never seen/read, for others you only see the title at a glance, and some are actually read. This is the principle of scoring, which is even older, I think it was part of the first PARC Altos.
What I meant is that I wonder how long it will take nowadays to go back to creating a decentralized model or, since overhead allows for it today, a distributed one, that serves modern forms of human communication:
- blogs (e.g. Nostr's long-form notes in Habla, or WireFreely for the Fediverse)
- non-synchronous short messages (e.g. Twitter/X style)
- synchronous short messages, i.e. chat
With a decentralized/distributed network for distribution where everyone keeps what they want on their own hardware.
On the sidelines, it would be nice today to also see synchronous audio and audio+video, meaning calls and conferences, all in a single UI and with at most two or three protocols on the network side (one for asynchronous messages and media, one for chat if the asynchronous one doesn't cut it, and one for calls).
Without the end user having to make personal collages if they don't want to, using an app that is go-installable, pip-able, cargo-build-able, basically something that both those who want to try it and distro packagers can add quickly. This would help spread something among techies/nerds/geeks and also works for the end user, who would be introduced to this solution by the techies/nerds/geeks. To me, this is what's missing to see the big platforms currently in fashion get toppled.
Seeing projects like Offpunk inspired the thoughts above; that was the point :)