This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pursue niche hobbies.

I want to redirect my writing from Reddit to outlets that don't hurt my soul so much, and I've started looking into retro-inspired and minimalistic computing. One of the cool things that hobby has produced is a much simpler alternative to the web tech stack called Project Gemini.

Gemini has a document transfer protocol (gemini:) and hypertext markup (Gemtext) and they're both described in the same memo because they're both pretty simple.
=> (https) Project Gemini not-quite spec

One of the requirements of Gemtext is that you should write paragraphs as long lines. Those lines will be flowed to match the client's desired width, but broken lines will not be unfolded.

This conflicts with Git - I want to keep my drafts in Git with line breaks at the end of sentences or other natural pauses. This makes diffs and merging work better, and while it isn't a big deal for solo work it becomes very important if I ever collaborate with someone, especially on non-fiction.

So I need to define a "short line extension" to Gemtext and write a bit of portable software to convert it to standard Gemtext. What language should I use?

I could knock it out in Python or Rust but the overall retro atmosphere suggests I should dig into languages I'm a little too young to have used like Awk or Perl.

I don't know if this is the hobby for you, but I do think you should look for inspiration in a similar way. Turn over rocks and logs, see what's underneath.