Alhena is an easy-to-use, multi-platform Gemini/Spartan/Nex browser sporting an uncluttered, modern interface. Browse the small web in style!

🔗 Official Website

• Modern UI with dozens of themes
• Color emojis with four emoji sets
• ZWJ (Zero Width Joiner) emojis
• ANSI colors for formatted text
• Inline audio and video (VLC required)
• Font chooser for proportional fonts
• Inline image viewer
• Smooth adaptive scrolling
• Asynchronous networking and file access
• Client certificate creation and management
• Trust On First Use (TOFU)
• Bookmarks and history
• Multiple windows and tabs
• Backup data with merge
• Secure remote sync
• Titan upload protocol with ;edit
• HTTP and Gopher proxy support
• Built-In HTTP to Gemtext converter
• Spartan protocol
• Nex protocol
• Gemtext-aware Titan text editor
• Optional favicon.txt support
• Printing (and therefore PDF with drivers)
• Embedded text and images from data URLs

The goal is to provide a familiar, easy-to-use interface for exploring Geminispace. Gemtext documents are rendered without added clutter. Emojis are displayed in color and ZWJ emojis appear as a single image. 👨🏼‍🚀

Any system font can be used for displaying proportional text. Dozens of light and dark themes are available to make browsing easy on the eyes. The interface is simple and intuitive.

All settings, bookmarks, certificates and history are saved in an embedded database that can be backed-up and restored on other computers. Secure remote sync can be used to easily move your settings to other machines.

Alhena is built using Maven on Java 21 or greater. To compile, simply run:

git clone https://github.com/mochaman/alhena.git
cd alhena
mvn package

The alhena.jar will be created and copied to target/lib. To run, call java -jar with the path to /lib/alhena.jar. For example (if already in the target directory):

java -jar ./lib/alhena.jar

Alhena supports inline video and audio playback when VLC is installed. The feature must be enabled from the 'Settings' menu. The vlcj library does a good job of detecting VLC but there may be instances where you need to specify the location. This is done by creating a vlcj.config file in the ~/.config/vlcj directory. Examples:

On MacOS, discovery works fine if building from source. If you use one of the pre-build .dmg installs, you will likely need to create the vlcj.config file with the following line (assuming VLC is installed in the default location):

nativeDirectory=/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/lib

On versions of Linux using a snap install of VLC (like modern Ubuntu), you will likely need to create the vlcj.config file. The following is based on an Ubunutu snap install:

nativeDirectory=/snap/vlc/current/usr/lib

Whether the ~/.config/vlcj/vlcj.config file is required depends on whether discovery can find VLC. In testing, the embedded player worked "out of the box" on Windows, MacOS (built from source), Raspberry Pi and FreeBSD. VLC 3.x is required. Older versions will not work. VLC 4.x (in development) may or may not work.

Privacy Considerations: Per the author of vlcj, "it may be possible that a remote network access is made for meta data and album/cover art. This may unintentionally expose sensitive data regarding the media being parsed." If this is a concern, the embedded media player can be turned off from 'Settings'.

Prebuilt binaries are available for Windows, Mac, Linux and FreeBSD. Java is NOT required (except for the Basic install). The platform specific installs each include a small, custom jvm created with jlink.

• Windows x64 MSI installer
• MacOS aarch64 DMG (unsigned)
• MacOS x64 DMG (unsigned)
• Linux x64 untar and run 'Alhena' script
• Linux aarch64 untar and run 'Alhena' script
• FreeBSD x64 untar and run script
• Basic JAVA_HOME must point to Java 21+ directory. Unzip and run .bat or .sh.

You can try Alhena in a browser or VNC client with Docker.

🔗 Alhena on Docker Hub

docker run -p 6080:6080 -it --rm alhena

Then open your favorite browser and enter the following url:

http://localhost:6080/vnc.html

The password is alhena

Titan Text Editor:

Embedded Video (VLC Required):

ANSI Color:

Alhena is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3). See LICENSE for details.

As of version 5.0.5, Alhena is licensed under the GPLv3.
Previous versions (<= 5.0.1) were licensed under the BSD 2-Clause License

Have suggestions or found a bug? Open an issue or contribute via pull requests! 🚀