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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'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.
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.)
Last edited by silvyus_06; 12-21-2010 at 10:25 AM.
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