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Table of Contents
Gopher
Browsing Gopherspace
There are several ways to browse Gopher sites on your computer. Use the local Gopher Hole to test your Gopher browser.
Visually
The slickest and easiest solution is to install Lagrange. It's fast, the interface is clean, and it's available for iOS, Flatpak, and a multitude of other platforms. Even better, it also supports the Gemini protocol, which is sort of a modern version of Gopher with a few extra convenience & markup features. The Gopher & Gemini ecosystems are very close to each other, so having them both in the same browser is very useful.
If you want more options, check Wikipedia, but I'm telling you that Lagrange is the way to go.
Command Line
If you are using terminal you have a few solid options here. First are the text-mode web browsers Lynx & ELinks, which have decent built-in Gopher protocol support. For dedicated clients, ncgopher & Bombadillo are highly revered by the Gopher community.
Browser Extensions
Once upon a time, web browsers could access Gopher. Not anymore. Big Tech doesn't want you on a part of internet that can't run Javascript advertising beacons & spyware, so the feature was just ripped out of all web browsers around 20 years ago.
You can install browser extensions to browse Gopher sites, or the Floodgap Proxy, but there's no reason to. The whole point of using Gopher in 2026 is so that you can read plaintext articles without the mammoth memory footprint of modern web browsers. Just install Lagrange.
Advanced Wizardry
Because Gopher is a super simple protocol, you can easily hack it into things. Two tools of note:
First is the popular swiss-army knife curl. If you need to start scripting Gopher requests or spidering sites, curl is just as useful with Gopher sites as it is HTTP sites.
You can also mount Gopher sites as filesystems! Remember that Gopher was designed over 30 years ago to make it easy to organize basic articles, images & files for public distribution. The way Gopher data is formatted is extremely easy to pump into a mount point. To demonstrate this, I used ChatGPT to whip together a quick example in Go using FUSE, which I have for reference on Github at HumphreyBoaGart/gophuse. It's a bit risky to use (be wary about untrusted Gopher sites) but if you're using Gopher to power a filehost, this hat trick makes it really easy to grab files off your server in bulk.
Hosting Gopher Sites
This section needs expansion.
Find this page online at: https://bestpoint.institute/tools/gopher