elinks, the full featured text browser | |
Sunday Oct 14 10:21:44 2012 | |
Text browsers are absolutely necessary to surf the web in | |
non-graphical environments. However, many of them have been | |
unmaintained for several years so I fear that some of them might | |
disappear in the long run. | |
The first text browsers I used under a gnu/linux distribution were | |
w3m and lynx. I discovered elinks much later but I deeply | |
fell in love with it at first sight. | |
elinks is a real personal favourite. Even though I must confess tha | |
I mainly use w3m and lynx in my local machines. This has an | |
explanation, do not start freaking out yet! | |
When I have to translate, I use wordreference.com a lot. The adds a | |
so annoying that I end up logging into my shell account at | |
sdf-eu and visit wordreference.com with the help of elinks. Man, th | |
is a different world: speed, no distractions at all and besides, yo | |
almost have the same features you have with a regular graphical | |
browser. | |
Whereas I deeply despise adds and flashy stuff when I'm looking for | |
information. I do want to see the pictures if I'm visiting | |
any of my friends' personal websites. That is why I use w3m at home | |
You install w3m-img and you get instant inline image | |
support. So it is really for that reason. I use lynx at home too | |
because it is the only one with out-of-the-box support for | |
gopher. | |
Does that mean that you cannot see images or visit gopher holes wit | |
elinks? Not at all, with elinks I can do it all and much more. | |
I can check my gmail account, log into libre.fm to see my listening | |
stats and so many things that I can't possibly name them | |
all. It would be easier to make a list of the few things that I can | |
do. | |
The gopher support in elinks is a compile time option. You only nee | |
to compile it with gopher support and there you go. In | |
order to see images you only need an external image viewer and tell | |
elinks to use it. When you select an image elinks will prompt you | |
what to do with it. You only need to type which external program yo | |
want to use and add % which will be substituted with the image file | |
and voila! the image is there. | |
Typing the name of the image viewer every time can be a pita so you | |
can add to ~/.elinks/elinks.conf something like this: | |
set mime.extension.jpg="image/jpeg" | |
set mime.extension.jpeg="image/jpeg" | |
set mime.extension.png="image/png" | |
set mime.extension.gif="image/gif" | |
set mime.extension.bmp="image/bmp" | |
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix.ask = 0 | |
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix.block = 0 | |
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix.program = "vp %" | |
set mime.type.image.jpg = "image_viewer" | |
set mime.type.image.jpeg = "image_viewer" | |
set mime.type.image.png = "image_viewer" | |
set mime.type.image.gif = "image_viewer" | |
set mime.type.image.bmp = "image_viewer" | |
In my shell account at sdf-eu, elinks has already got gopher suppor | |
enabled. I simply have to add the previous mime types and | |
handlers to the right location. If you have not noticed it yet, I u | |
'vp' to view the images and huh I almost forget!!! | |
Enabling colours is a must. To do that, press the Esc key while | |
running elinks. Go to the menu bar that appears at the top, | |
select Setup and Terminal options and there select either 16, 88 or | |
256 colours. And then just, Enjoy!!! |