Text mode webbrowsing with elinks

Elinks is a text mode web browser

Elinks is a text mode webbrowser. There are more text mode webbrowsers, which are all one way or another descendents from lynx. lynx is available on almost every Linux distribution, but is not the finest of the flock.

elinks is fast, has a good user-interface, has a good configuration system and is really useable.

Elinks is a tabbed web browser

Tabbed browsing is a very useful method. Elinks provides this functionality for quite some time now. The default key-bindings are very intuitive:

Links can be opened in a different tab by using <Ctrl-T>. Switching from one tab to another is done by pressing the <-key or the >key.

Tabs can be closed by pressing the c-key.

Screenshot of Elinks
The bottom shows some tabs
Click for larger image

The benefits of a text mode webbrowser

There are several benefits of a text mode webbrowser above a gui browser:

• ultra-fast:
  Nothing beats the speed of a text mode webbrowser
• readability:
  The webpages are shown in your terminal-window with the font that comes with that window. This results in great readability, no matter how fancy the editor of the webpage tried to be.
• constant color-scheme:
  Although it is possible to let elinks show the colors as the editor of the webpage build it, it is much more common to let elinks only use pre-defined text colors (pre-defined by runtime-configuration)
• runs in GNU Screen
• no mouse needed:
  Keep your arms and wrists healthier by using that mouse as less as possible

elinks beats other text mode browsers

From the family of text mode webbrowsers, elinks simply is the best:

• Good runtime-configuration
• Tabbed browsing
• Fast rendering
• Abillity to cope with frames

Elinks is a great part of a text mode shell server

Resources

• Elinks home page
• Lynx home page