Right now I’m trying to use my terminal for everything so I was thinking to maybe give a shot for one of the terminal http browsers. There’s so many of them and I don’t know what are the differences between them. I would like to have gemini and gopher support at the same time as I’m using them also so. If you know which one have features like that please share with this information also.
Please give answers related to question or share your experience with browsing internet in terminal. I don’t want to see comments saying that there’s no point in it because modern web is as it is. Let me have fun 😄
Sorry, I will not talk about browsers in your list because I’ve tried them and my personal preference goes to chawan for these reasons:
- has CSS layout support
- has HTML5 support with various encodings
- can display Inline images in terminals that support Sixel or Kitty protocols (opt-in feature)
- offers basic JavaScript support via QuickJS (opt-in)
- supports HTTP(S), SFTP, FTP, Gopher, Gemini…
- has built-in viewers for Markdown, man pages, and directory listings
- has Incremental loading
- uses multi-processing, so several buffers can be loaded at once
- offer mouse support, bookmarks, and protocol handling extensible by users
If you want to check another option, there’s also brow.sh.
Hope this helps in your web terminal journey :)
Wow!!! Thank you. I must try them
I spent about 6 months several years ago without a WM. I used links -g and gpm to browse graphically (and with a mouse) using the framebuffer. At the time, lynx couldn’t do that.
I’ve been using Links for years. I rarely meet another Links user, as TUI web browser use is rare in and of itself, and most go to w3m or lynx from what I’ve seen.
TUI browsers are surprisingly capable of getting you around the web even with more limited features, as long as you mainly are focused on accessing public text documents and communications.
I know one of the main uses I saw some utilizing Links for was when it was recommended during the Gentoo installation process when you had to download a stage 3 tarball. Most just had another browser or used a different Linux iso during installation, but if you were installing via the tty, and had no other device with a web browser on it, that was (and still is) a solid choice for finding and downloading the needed tarball.
Anyways, just a bit of lore. My only complaint with Links is it doesn’t let you change the keybindings and they default to emacs. No shade to emacs, but I am and probably always will be a vim user, so there’s that. Other than that I’ll always be a big fan of Links.
