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 that 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 are so annoying that I end up logging into my shell account at sdf-eu and visit wordreference.com with the help of elinks. Man, that is a different world: speed, no distractions at all and besides, you 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 with 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't do. The gopher support in elinks is a compile time option. You only need 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 you 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 support enabled. I simply have to add the previous mime types and handlers to the right location. If you have not noticed it yet, I use '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!!! ______________________________________________________________________ Gophered by Gophernicus/1.6 on NetBSD/amd64 9.1