Telescope is Probably One of the Lightest Gemini Clients/Browsers Out There (One Megabyte of RAM)

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2021-07-02 01:15:33 UTC
Modified: 2021-07-02 01:23:27 UTC

Front page of Techrights in Telescope
Front page of Techrights (as shown in the new release of Telescope)

Summary: Telescope was released some hours ago; it's a simple and lightweight program for accessing Gemini capsules; to quote the developer: "The main difference between telescope and others (I've only tried tinmop and amfora as TUI clients) is the Emacs (and w3m) inspired interface: instead of scrolling a page and typing a number to open a link, you have a cursor you can move freely around the page. The default keybindings are heavily inspired from Emacs, but I tried at least to include some keys familiar to vi(1) users, so hjkl, gg, G, gT etc. work. All the keybindings are customizable anyway."

EARLIER today (about 7 hours ago) Omar Polo announced the first release of Telescope, which is a Gemini client with a very narrow list of dependencies. It's developed on a local Git setup (GitHub is only a mirror) and initial feedback from the past few hours had been positive [1, 2, 3, 4], so we've decided to give it a go, taking it for a quick spin.

Telescope RAM usage Amfora would likely be its main 'competition', but Amfora is Microsoft-controlled (GitHub) and it uses Rust (also Microsoft-controlled). It's also heavier in the RAM sense. My system allocates 12 MB of RAM to Amfora and that climbs up to 40 MB when I start browsing. How odd; I remember running Firefox 1.0-2.0 on a PC with just 32 MB of RAM (total). Telescope, by contrast, opens a set of processes, but all of them are tiny. See the screenshot on the right.

Isn't it odd that Amfora, which does not use a GUI, takes up a lot more RAM than the GTK-based Moonlander? ⬆

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