![]() ![]() This is something that text browsers do well, and why text browsers continue to be relevant today. On the other hand, web pages that are really hypertext documents wrapped in useless and inaccessible JavaScript and CSS can have all of the event handlers and CSS properties ignored, and become legible again. ![]() ![]() You can argue that using the CSS display property is a bad hack around the poor performance of adding/removing DOM elements, but the general problem of trying to automatically adapt a GUI application to terminal display does not change (having the GUI be emulated in HTML that is meant to be displayed in the GUI of the web browser just adds a layer of indirection, difficulty, and inefficiency). Links is a free software text and graphical web browser with a pull-down menu system. w3m displays hidden text and greatly improves readability on many web pages. Not to be confused with Lynx (web browser). There are broken web pages that hide the text you want to read until you click on some JavaScript modal, or some "Click to continue reading" link/button that breaks scrolling. 4:39 am on (gmt 0) Had been using Lynx for quite a while, but recently started using Elinks when I found it in a backwater directory of my nix machine. You can do that by pressing H while running w3m.Displaying hidden text is one of the places where text browsers can "fix" broken web pages. W3m doesn't use the same keyboard shortcuts as other command line browsers, so get ready to learn some new ones. The browser doesn't do JavaScript, though.Īs far as the important job of rendering web pages, w3m does a better job than Links2 or ELinks even with complex pages. Like ELinks2, w3m lets you view images on a page using an external program. You can navigate web pages using a mouse, and the browser will render tables and even accept cookies. While it might not have as many features as the other browsers I discuss in this post, w3m gets the job done. When I first fired up w3m, it reminded me of a cross between the classic text-based browser Lynx and the UNIX/Linux text viewer more. ELinks opens the image with an application like ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick. ELinks Linux Demonstration 6,907 views 13 Dislike Share Save Shaun Fossett 102 subscribers Short screencast of ELinks (Lynx) text only browser. Either click the placeholder for the image or highlight it and press v on your keyboard. Press ESC on your keyboard display a set of menus that let you enter and save URLs, add bookmarks, set up the browser, and more.ĮLinks lacks a graphical mode, but it does have a nifty feature that lets you view images on a web page. One feature that makes ELinks stand out from other command line browsers is its menu system. While it supports using a mouse to follow hyperlinks, ELinks lacks support for Javascript. And like Links2, ELinks can display tables and frames. Like Links2, ELinks is a fork of the Links browser. You can also use your mouse to follow hyperlinks whether you're in text or graphical mode. The browser can display frames and tables, and supports basic JavaScript. That's not the only trick that Links2 can do. When you start it by typing links2 at the command line and go to a website, the result is something like this:īut when you run links2 -g then visit a site, the result is something like this: It's a lot like its predecessor in that it gives you the option to run either in text-only mode or graphical mode. Links2 bills itself as the graphical version of the venerable Links. Let's take a look at three browsers for the command line. They're niche, but still get the job done. Web browsers that run in a terminal window are alive and kicking. You'd think that browsing the web at the command line would have gone the way of the tag. Jump forward to these days of web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and a few others. Text-based web browsers are used mostly on computers with more or less large displays, so there are less of dimensional restrictions and more temptations: Lynx. ELinks is an Open Source project covered by the GNU General Public License. Check the about page for a more complete description. It is quite portable and runs on a variety of platforms. Some of use visited web pages using command-line, text-only browsers like the venerable Lynx. ELinks can render both frames and tables, is highly customizable and can be extended via Lua or Guile scripts. A time when most of us went online using low-powered PCs or dumb terminals, often over slow dial-up connections. Let's take a trip back in time to the early, simpler days of the web. ( Note: This post was first published, in a slightly different form, at and appears here via a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.) ![]()
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