Gopher Reader

Any web page as clean text with numbered links

Gopher Reader turns the page you are on into clean, distraction-free text with numbered links, in a new tab. The original page stays untouched. Click the toolbar button or press Alt+Shift+0, then switch between the Article, Full page and Links views.

Everything happens locally. The extension makes no network requests, has no accounts and collects no data. Images become short descriptions and form contents are never copied.

Features

• Three views: Article extracts the main text, Full page keeps navigation and sidebars, Links lists every destination with a stable number.
• Reading controls: search the text, change the font size and wrapping, choose a light or dark appearance. Your settings are kept.
• Save and export: bookmark the source page, export the text as a UTF-8 file with its numbered links, refresh the text from the source tab.
• Nothing leaves your computer: no network requests, no analytics, no accounts. Reading copies disappear when their tab closes.
• Optional Gopher app for Linux: save pages into the free Gopher Client desktop app and read them offline over the real Gopher protocol, see below.
• Chrome, Edge and Firefox: install it from the Chrome Web Store in Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers, or from Firefox Add-ons in Firefox desktop.

Gopher Client, the desktop app for Linux

Gopher Client is a native Gopher browser for the Linux desktop. Gopher is the text-only predecessor of the web: menus, text documents and searches, with no scripts, no ads and no tracking. The app opens any gopher:// address, including links from other programs, keeps bookmarks and browsing history, sends search queries to Gopher servers, wraps long text for reading and hands web links to your normal browser.

Together with the extension it becomes a reading library. “Open in Gopher app” in the reader tab saves the article text, the full-page text and the numbered links in the app, which serves them over the real Gopher protocol on your own computer (127.0.0.1:7070, reachable only from that machine). Saved pages stay readable offline, link to each other and are open to any other Gopher client on the same computer. The “Saved web pages” button in the app reopens or removes them and stops serving whenever you want.

Install: download the Linux package from the releases page, extract it and run ./install.sh. It installs for your user only, needs no administrator rights, adds the app to the application menu, registers gopher:// links and sets up the browser integration for Chrome, Chromium, Edge and Firefox. It needs a 64-bit Linux desktop with GTK 3. The extension works without the app, and the app works without the extension.

Free and open source under the MIT license. Source code, the Gopher Client desktop app for Linux and the issue tracker are at github.com/rafael-minuesa/gopher-flutter-client.