Goodbye Offpunk, Welcome XKCDpunk!
by Ploum on 2025-04-01
For the last three years, I’ve been working on Offpunk, a command-line gemini and web browser.
While my initial goal was to browse the Geminisphere offline, the mission has slowly morphed into cleaning and unenshitiffying the modern web, offering users a minimalistic way of browsing any website with interesting content.
Focusing on essentials
From the start, it was clear that Offpunk would focus on essentials. If a website needs JavaScript to be read, it is considered as non-essential.
It worked surprisingly well. In fact, in multiple occurrence, I’ve discovered that some websites work better in Offpunk than in Firefox. I can comfortably read their content in the former, not in the latter.
By default, Offpunk blocks domains deemed as nonessentials or too enshitified like twitter, X, facebook, linkedin, tiktok. (those are configurable, of course. Defaults are in offblocklist.py).
Cleaning websites, blocking worst offenders. That’s good. But it is only a start.
It’s time to go further, to really cut out all the crap from the web.
And, honestly, besides XKCD comics, everything is crap on the modern web.
As an online technical discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison with an existing XKCD comic approaches 1.
– XKCD’s law
If we know that we will end our discussion with an XKCD’s comic, why not cut all the fluff? Why don’t we go straight to the conclusion in a true minimalistic fashion?
Introducing XKCDpunk
That’s why I’m proud to announce that, starting with today’s release, Offpunk 2.7 will now be known as XKCDpunk 1.0.
XKCDpunk includes a new essential command "xkcd" which, as you guessed, takes an integer as a parameter and display the relevant XKCD comic in your terminal, while caching it to be able to browse it offline.
Of course, this is only an early release. I need to clean a lot of code to remove everything not related to accessing xkcd.com. Every non-xkcd related domain will be added to offblocklist.py.
I also need to clean every occurrence of "Offpunk" to change the name. All offpunk.net needs to be migrated to xkcd.net. Roma was not built in one day.
Don’t hesitate to install an "offpunk" package, as it will still be called in most distributions.
And report bugs on the xkcdpunk’s mailinglist.
Goodbye Offpunk, welcome XKCDpunk!
I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.
I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!