Hello Everyone,

Just wondering if anyone knew of a really good text based terminal browser to use when I am not running X. I can use Links and do not have too much trouble navigating, but I have not been able to set the screen to view the entire page (I have to move off screen to read the whole page.) So, if anyone knows an easier text browser that is a little easier to set the screen options with, I would appreciate the tip. Also,

returns:

Anyone know about that?

Thanks for any replies.

Bob

Can't tell what the best choice for your requirements is, but there are not so many alternatives. I am only aware of these:

elinks
lynx
w3m

I guess (no: I am sure!) that you can also use Emacs for web browsing.
I haven't used text browsers in a while, but my preference was once w3m, because it had support UTF-8 long before any of the others. To my knowledge, links and lynx do not yet support UTF-8 up to now, not sure about elinks.

gargamel

Hi, it kind of depends on if you want graphics or not. For graphics links -g is the only one afaik. The error is that now slackware does not come with the svgalib helper module so you need to be able to read /dev/mem as user. A simple chmod should fix it.

The problem with links is that it doesn't save coookies/login info between sessions so it's inconvenient if you say want to visit forums and other places that need logins.

For this reason I prefer elinks which does save cookies and login info persistently. It doesn't have graphics, but it is the most advanced text browser afaik, and it very customisable and supports scripting too.

Elinks is available on SBo and you should also grab my js (spidermonkey) slackbuild and install that first. It can then use the mozilla js engine.

Hope this helps

Edit: Yes elinks supports utf-8 and many other character sets.

Thanks for the replies....

@gargamel: I doubt if I would ever learn to use emacs as browser. I can't even learn to use it as a text editor. But I have also read that it can be used as a browser.

@dive: Thanks for the information. That helps a lot. I discovered lynx is a little easier to use than links, but still won't display the entire page. I will give elinks a shot. Thanks for the tip about changing permissions on /dev/mem.

I only use a text based browser when I boot up for forums and such. It's easier on my eyes and this laptop seems to use a lot of resources in X (KDE). If I really need graphics I just startx.

Thanks again...appreciate the help.

Bob

W3M is the only one that AFAIK will give you images in a console through imlib2.
ELinks is the only one that has decent javascript implemention through js.

I'm not sure about the off-page problem, but have you tried setting a resolution in /etc/vga/vgalib.conf? (that's for graphics though)

Sadly it seems that people are OK with text mode browsers being incomplete when it comes to web standards just because they run in the terminal. It is rather unfortunate. Anyway, elinks supports tabs, which is very nice. It also supports full colour for background and foreground. As for images, you can hack something together with a framebuffer, but I haven't done this so I'm not sure if it will display inline like w3m or if it would just launch an image viewer with image mime types if you want to see a specific image.

Seconding elinks, or look into w3m.