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Musings the Web

3 Web Browsers for the Linux Command Line

1 NOVMBR, 2021

(Note: This post was first published, in a slightly different form, at

Opensource.com and appears here via a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.)

Let’s take a trip back in time to the early, simpler days of the web. A time
when most of us went online using low-powered PCs or dumb terminals,
often over slow dial-up connections. Some of use visited web pages using
command-line, text-only browsers like the venerable Lynx.

Jump forward to these days of web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari,
and a few others. You’d think that browsing the web at the command line
would have gone the way of the tag. You’d be wrong. Web browsers that
run in a terminal window are alive and kicking. They’re niche, but still get
the job done.

Let’s take a look at three browsers for the command line.

Links2
Links2 bills itself as the graphical version of the venerable Links. It’s a lot
like its predecessor in that it gives you the option to run either in text-only
mode or graphical mode.
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 When you start it by typing links2 at the command line and go to a
website, the result is something like this:

But when you run links2 -g then visit a site, the result is something like
this:
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 That’s not the only trick that Links2 can do. The browser can display
frames and tables, and supports basic JavaScript. You can also use your
mouse to follow hyperlinks whether you’re in text or graphical mode.

ELinks
Like Links2, ELinks is a fork of the Links browser. And like Links2, ELinks
can display tables and frames. While it supports using a mouse to follow
hyperlinks, ELinks lacks support for Javascript.

One feature that makes ELinks stand out from other command line
browsers is its menu system. Press ESC on your keyboard display a set of
menus that let you enter and save URLs, add bookmarks, set up the
browser, and more.
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 ELinks lacks a graphical mode, but it does have a nifty feature that lets
you view images on a web page. Either click the placeholder for the image
or highlight it and press v on your keyboard. ELinks opens the image with
an application like ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick.

w3m
When I first fired up w3m, it reminded me of a cross between the classic
:
 text-based browser Lynx and the UNIX/Linux text viewer more. While it
might not have as many features as the other browsers I discuss in this
post, w3m gets the job done.

You can navigate web pages using a mouse, and the browser will render
tables and even accept cookies. Like ELinks2, w3m lets you view images
on a page using an external program. The browser doesn’t do JavaScript,
though.

As far as the important job of rendering web pages, w3m does a better job
than Links2 or ELinks even with complex pages. The rendering is clean
and colourful.

w3m doesn’t use the same keyboard shortcuts as other command line
browsers, so get ready to learn some new ones. You can do that by
pressing H while running w3m.

— SCOTT NSBITT
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