 And the last week or two, it seems like everybody and their grandmother has made a video about the Gemini protocol. The Gemini protocol is an alternative internet protocol to the modern web. It's light, it's fast, it's mainly just plain text. There's no images or multimedia, there's no ads, there's no JavaScript, and it's really fantastic. And I think that's why it's getting so much attention all of a sudden, it's gaining popularity rather fast, is because it is actually really nice. The more I hang out on the Gemini space, the more I like it. And it's not just me liking it. Now many of you guys have tried it out since I made my initial video about this about a week ago. Many of you guys are trying it out and contacting me and asking me questions about setting up Gemini servers and what Gemini clients to use and things like that. Many of you guys are sharing links to your own personal Gemini capsules. It's just really fantastic. And having spent about a week with Gemini myself setting up my own Gemini capsule, you know, I wanted to share a few things with you. The first thing I want to share with you guys is how to customize a Gemini client. And the one I use is a terminal client called Amfora. I found that to be just a really fantastic program. So let me launch a terminal here and I'm going to zoom in a little bit. Now I'm going to run Amfora Gemini colon slash slash distro.tube. That is the URL to my personal Gemini capsule. And I have worked on this side here a little bit. Actually, I spent a few hours in the last week building what I've got so far. I still got a lot more planned for it. But the first page here, the index.gmi here is links to, you know, social media stuff, my links to my YouTube channel, my library channel, links to my Patreon. And then I went ahead and included some articles because on my traditional website at distro.tube.com, you know, I do have a blog and I have some articles that I've written over the last couple of years. I don't do a lot of blog writing, but I've got some stuff published there. So some of the more interesting ones, what I did is I took them and I went ahead and converted them into the proper text formatting to put them on my Gemini capsule. So this particular article is called Standardized Keybindings Across All Tiling Window Managers. And it's, you know, this was very easy to move over because if I go to this particular blog post here, let me see if I can find it. Here it is. You know, it's really not much. I really didn't even need to open the HTML document itself. All I did was just copy the plain text here and add the appropriate syntax for converting it over to the Gemini protocol, which included, you know, giving it a header by having a hash symbol, a single pound sign there for the top level heading there. Other than that, the only other formatting I did was all of this is pre-formatted text that allows me to keep the spacing because I created this almost two-columned kind of format here. There's no tables or anything in Gemini. Pre-formatted text, by the way, and what this is, it's a block of text that begins with three backticks and ends with three backticks. And then when you have a Gemini client serve up this page, it serves it up as pre-formatted text. That's the same as the article's logo here at the top, which is just some ASCII text. If I go back here to my home page, DistroTube, this very fancy ASCII text generation here, this is all pre-formatted text here. And you can always tell that it's pre-formatted text because if I, you know, open up another terminal here, let me reload this page here. You see all of these lines here actually are non-preformatted text lines, meaning they do get wrapped, right, as we adjust the size of the terminals. See these lines are wrapped, but pre-formatted text is not wrapped. It actually runs off the side of the terminal here. So that is one of the ways you can tell what's pre-formatted text and what is not. Another way to tell is if your Gemini client colors pre-formatted text differently than plain text. And in my case, I have M4 as setting the color for pre-formatted text to be this yellowish orange color. That way I always know what pre-formatted text is. So you know, I can immediately spot that that's pre-formatted text rather than just plain text, which is the white font here. Now let me go back to the home page here. One thing I should mention about the ASCII text generations here is how do you get these fancy ASCII text? Well, there's a number of programs you can install in Linux. One of the most popular ones is a program called Figlet. And to run Figlet, I have it installed on my system. You just run Figlet and then, you know, I could do distro.tube if I wanted distro.tube in this fancy way here. My Figlet does have some flags and options available for it. So if I do 2017-f bubble, what this does is it's going to run Figlet on this text 2017, the year 2017, and it's going to do bubble text. And it's going to create 2017 encircled by these other characters here in this bubble effect. And that is exactly what I did. If I go to my video library here on the index page for my capsule here, you see videos from 2017, 18, 19, 20, 21. Let's go to the link for videos from 2017. I'm going to hit 8 on the keyboard and you see that is the text I generated in the terminal and then I just pasted it as pre-formatted text in this particular page on my Gemini capsule. Now if you want fancier text generations, there's a lot of online tools that you could use. What I would suggest doing is go to your favorite search engine and just do a search for ASCII text generator and there's a million of them. It really doesn't matter which one you use. Most of them use the same programs. Most of them are just web front-ends to things like Figlet and Toilet and a bunch of other text generation programs. But all you do is go in one of these and then do distro.tube, for example. And then I'm going to create it in what style? I want the bloody style here. And you can see distro.tube, you know, this kind of horror movie kind of effect, which if I go back here and let me go back to the top of the page, that is where I got that effect going on on my home page. Now let me switch workspaces here because on another workspace I have a terminal open and I've already SSH'd into my Gemini server. If I do pwd, I'm in home slash Gemini because this user is called Gemini. And then I'm going to cd into content. And in content is actually where I have all of my documents for the Gemini server, you know, for the site itself, including the index page, index.Gemini. Let me open that in vim. And I'm going to go to the top and you see all of the ASCII text here at the top. That is what's creating that distro.tube bloody text effect. It doesn't look quite right in this terminal. But you know, that's all I did was copy this and pasted that here and it just, it doesn't display it correctly, but make sure you wrap it in the three back text. So it needs to begin with three back ticks and it needs to end in three back ticks. And that creates the pre-formatted text you need. Let me quit out of that. I'm going to go back to the Gemini client here, the M4 client. Now I've gotten questions about how to theme the M4 client because my M4 client doesn't look like your M4 client because I've really played with the colors to fit my general color scheme that I use in all my tiling window managers. I wanted to match my terminal color scheme and my Emacs color scheme. I use the color scheme that I use in pretty much everything here in M4. But how did I achieve all of that? Well, let me open up a terminal. Let me zoom in a little bit. And in Vim, I'm going to open up .config, M4 config.toml. And there's several things that I changed in this config file. Matter of fact, I should just briefly go through it with you guys because you may be interested in changing some of this as well. The very first thing I changed in M4 was the home page. By default, the home page was a home page for just general information about the Gemini protocol. That's that to be my actual Gemini capsule, Gemini colon slash slash distro dot tube. By the way, if you ever open a terminal and the page is not quite right, what you need to do is just hit R on the keyboard in M4 to reload the page so it fits back correctly. You know, it adjusts to the correct terminal size. That does happen anytime you have a like a terminal full screen and then all of a sudden you change it to half width. Well, it's still displaying the text like it's full screen. So just hit R on the keyboard to quickly reload it and it reloads immediately anyway, because again, we're just dealing with plain text. Some other settings here, color equals true. You want color to equal true so you can have color in M4, antsy equals true, bullets equals true. What bullets is, is if you have a list, you do lists with asterisks. But if you want them to actually be changed to bullets like this here, this is, this is the bullets here. If this was set to false, bullets equals false, you would have just the asterisks appearing rather than the actual bullets. I have show link equals false, what that is, is every link on the page. We have a link and then we have the title. I don't need to see the actual link. I only want to see the specified title for that link. If I had show link equals true, we would have the title and the link both displayed. But again, that's just extra information that I really don't need to see. Some other things I changed in M4 was HTTP equals and then whatever browser you want to use to open HTTP links. I set this to LibreWolf. You can set it to whatever. You can leave it as HTTP equals default, which will always use your default browser on the system if that's what you want to use. I also set the search URL, which is, there's a Gemini search engine at this URL. So anytime I do the search command, it's going to go to that site. You can also adjust the margins and the width. So the margins are the percentage of margins on either side of your Gemini pages. So at 0.10, that's 10% margin on either side. So it needs to be a number between zero and one zero, of course, is no margin. I also have max width equals 140 characters. By default, I think it's set to 100 characters. I wanted it to be a little wider. You may want to play with the margins and the width depending on what size monitors you use. Just play with the numbers and figure out what looks best on your monitors. Now I did change a lot of the M4 key bindings. So the default key bindings, a lot of them were pretty good, but there were some that I didn't like. I prefer Vim key bindings and by default M4 used some Emacs like key bindings like it used B for back and F for forward and things like that. And I wanted to change those to standard Vim motion keys, HJKL. So another thing I also did is by default the space bar opens up like a prompt at the bottom of M4 and I changed that to a colon. So typing colon opens that bar rather than space. Why? It's because that's what you do in Vim and all Vim like programs is you do a colon to get into command mode. So I changed that from using the space bar to using the colon. I changed some other stuff. H and L go back and forward and B is now getting me to the bookmarks. O is an edit. So if I type O, it's going to edit the URL that I'm actually on right now. So O really is for opening a URL, but it's opening the one you're currently on. But I could adjust this to, you know, maybe I wanted to instead of going to my index.gmi, maybe there was a page on here called next.gmi. You know, I could just adjust the URL I'm on to whatever it is I want to go to. Now some of these keybinding values were not here in the M4 config by default. They were not in the example config. So how did I find some of these settings? Well, what I did is I dug through the source code a little bit. If you go to the M4 GitHub and look at the source code, go to config. And in config, go to this file here, keybundings.go. And I searched through this file until I got to this section here. Config, bindings, equals, map, command, string, and then these here. So keybindings, bind link one, bind link two, all of this, bind home, bind bookmarks, all of these, these are values that you could plug into this here. Matter of fact, let me find some of the ones I just showed you. There's bind underscore home is H. So if I type H on the keyboard, it goes to my home page. My home page is set to distro.tube, which we're already on. But if I wasn't on it, let me go to another page. I'm going to hit eight on the keyboard to go to videos from 2017. If I hit H on the keyboard, we go to my home page. So that's a little bit about the M4 config. And then, of course, that's only useful if you guys use the M4 terminal Gemini client. But I think it's probably the best one out there. So I suggest you guys check that out. Another thing I wanted to mention is that so many of us are checking out Gemini and creating our own Gemini capsules. If you have a Gemini capsule, let me know about it because I'll link to your page here. Another thing is this side here that I've got link number 20 on my page currently, Medusa, eSpace, Gemini directory. Let me go to that. So let me do 20 on the keyboard here to go to that link. And this is a guy that has created a directory of various Gemini capsules. So if you create a Gemini capsule, make sure you go and let this guy know about it so he can add it to the Gemini directory. Again, there's a Gemini search engine as well. Let me go back here. I have the Gemini search engine linked here. This is link 14, at least that's what it is currently until I had some more links than the numbers will adjust. But if I go to number 14 here, GeminiSpace.info, this is the Gemini search engine. And again, if your Gemini capsule is not showing up in the Gemini search engine, maybe let this guy know about your site because we need more stuff in the Gemini space. And what I think I'm gonna do is the very first comment of this video. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a comment myself and I'm gonna pin it. And I want you guys, if you've created a Gemini capsule, post a link to your Gemini capsule. Give me the URL and by posting your URL, of course, I may check out some of your sites and you guys can check out each other's sites, your Gemini capsules. Maybe we all enter link to our capsules, no pressure on that. Link to what you want to link to, things you find useful. But I think we need to do more promoting of Gemini already. A lot of people that are checking it out are finding it just a fascinating thing. I know I've just been blown away by it. If I really didn't think Gemini had a future, I would not have spent several hours this week working on this Gemini capsule. Let me tell you these video links here. Let me go to link number 11 here, videos from the year 2020. If I page down here, this was not easy to create. I had to go get every title of every video from the year 2020 that I made and then give you guys the library link is what I posted. That took some time. This was not something that was just a 10 minute job, right? I've spent several hours putting this together. I know a lot of you guys have spent a lot of time working on yours. So again, post yours in the show description. Again, look for the pinned comment below and that's where you guys should leave your URLs for your Gemini sites. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Ebsi, Dallas, Devin Fran, Gabe, Lou, Corbinian, Mitchell, Lacombe, Archie, 2535, Chris Chuck, David, the other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Pick, Veeam, Scott, Wesson, Willie. They are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. They are the producers of this show. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because DistroTube is not corporate sponsored. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to help out, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace.