What's Your Favorite CLI Web Browser? Go!
 

Lynx, Links, Links2, Elinks, Links-hacked, w3m, and any others you might like? Why does your favorite rock the most?

I use Lynx. It's easy to navigate and easy to read.

links, because it works. :) I don't care which one is it; it depends on which one is pre-installed on the system. But I started with w3m but it seems that links (or lynx) is more popular than w3m.^^

I've been using elinks on the command line.

I browsed the web for an entire day with 'wget' and 'vi' once

Even though I am a commandline junkie. I prefer to surf the web with firefox.

But, if the Xserver is down and I need to surf the web to get troubleshooting info, I would use either lynx or links.

I haven't tried any of them yet. It's another item on my "Things I should be doing instead of hanging about on LQ writing silly posts" list.

w3m because it doesn't butcher site layouts as bad as links/lynx.

Mmm, just been looking at the SlackBuild page for w3m:
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.1/network/w3m/
Particularly this bit:

I don't use them as often as I would prefer, but I'm starting to like w3m.

How can you use CLI-browsers? They can't display pages correctly... Today sites are flooded with Java, Flash, shiny, eye-candy design.

ahahaha damn that's quite an achievement.

Actually I've been spending alot of time on Arch recently and links2 is it's default browser so that's what I've been using. The colors of elinks were easier on my eyes and I loved the tabbed browsing, but somehow the font and the frames got all screwed up so I uninstalled it. Maybe I'll try it again later, or maybe links2 will decide to implement tabbed browsing.

That's precisely the point. The sites I need are frequently just plain html. Or if they have bling, it is adverts that I can live without.

Ever hear of a cli browser exploit?

w3m won't open gmail... :(

I've had trouble with w3m and gmail as well. But elinks works with gmail for me.

I can't imagine why someone would want to browse the web in the command line other than if a GUI is unavailable of just to try it for fun.

It's really clunky and terrible, I can barely even navigate the posts in a thread here because the member info in the left sidebar goes above the post takes up the whole screen, and quotes are not in boxes I can't tell where they end.

Well, there are times when I don't have a GUI installed for example, or X breaks for some reason, that it's handy. And I generally ssh into my desktop to read rss feeds via newsbeuter, and if something links to this or that other article and I want to quickly read it, I open it up in elinks. Or if I'm away from home and a new distro or the like is released and I want to download it to my home computer, same thing, I'll ssh in, use elinks to find and download the torrent file for the distro, and use aria2c to download the torrent.

I stated my reason for using a text browser.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...8/#post4178359

I also want to add that navigating the text browser becomes tedious when you have to use the arrow keys to move about.

I've been playing around with these browsers some more and came up with some interesting comparisons. Elinks supports images indirectly. You can click on the [IMG] tags and type "fbi %" in the prompt box and press 'open' and it will load a single image into the framebuffer. w3m supports images directly, loading them right on the page, though you do pay the price for this in speed. Elinks will use gpm to allow you to select links and forms with the mouse which is very nifty. It won't let you copy and paste with gpm though. W3m and lynx do not let you navigate with the mouse, but you can copy and paste, which makes in nice if you're looking for a solution to a problem that might require some copying and pasting. Running elinks from inside screen or tmux adds copying and pasting to its functionality so I think that is probably the best CLI browser setup I've found so far.

Oh and w3m is the most VI-like of the browsers. It even opens vim for filling out forms.

i've seen this post about lynx and installed to try it out

help me please i don't seem to be able to find any adress bar i can point it to go ( google.com ) ? help

Press 'g' and enter the URL.

Lynx Help for Beginners

Thanks alot. I tried to read it from the CLI. i suppose i shouldnt. missed that out. so yeah ... it's awesome to be able to do this (it could have helped me alot when i was in front of a computer that was always locking up and once i got into cli and saw that i had i dont know what security enabled cpu and i had to boot into windows and do hard stuff to get it done. i could have just used the ubuntu live cd.)

Elinks is by far my favorite. I browse the web with it regularly.