Over the past year as I’ve gotten into linux and self-hosting as a hobby, I’ve found an interest in using terminals and the “minimalist” feeling it gives me. Recently I found out there are terminal based web browsers and I’m really interested in the stripped down nature of web browsing it offers.
I already tried out W3M but I know there are a few others such as Lynx and Browsh.
I’m interested in hearing about other people’s experiences with terminal web browsers, the pro’s and con’s and also the reasons for using them.
Well, if you want some really interesting experience i would recommend trying out Edbrowse, but for a really good day to day experience i personally really like Lynx: Most (for me) relevant pages work very well with it, it has a seamless gopher Integration and the UI hasn’t changed (much) since i first used it in the mid 90s.
Why use Lynx? Well, it keeps away all the crap that makes the web unbearable since people started plastering their pages with blinking ad-banners, and today it is an absolutely great way to get around paywalls and read pages and articles undisturbed.
I’ve had a good enough experience with lynx that I gave it it’s own alias. Now anytime I want to search i just “ddg anything” and usually I can find the result in want without leaving the terminal.
I’m sure there are other great uses but that’s all I use it for and I love it.
I tested most of them, I was not satisfied. Went back to ff-esr. Really wanted a usable CLI browser but I think my use case was just silly.
You might enjoy Surfraw, the Shell Users’ Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web. I once used an old laptop like that with byobu and w3m but all the keybinds became tiring. Now it’s just a soon to be e-waste interactive fiction interpreter.
I hadn’t heard of surfraw, that looks cool!
My wanna-be-mr-robot friend and I were using lynx, elinks, and then browsh for a long time when we were experimenting with terminal-only linux laptop setups. Lynx and elinks are good for true text-only web browsing, but browsh is better if you want a more traditional web browser, but just inside a terminal window. It is actually running firefox headless in the background to render the pages, so it’s much more resource-heavy than others.
There’s no real advantage to a terminal browser if you aren’t being forced to use one, in which case “having a browser” is the advantage, it’s just aesthetics (especially if you enjoy customizing your terminal themes, since you can make your lynx match it).
Yeah I don’t see any huge advantage in using a terminal browser over a full featured browser. However, I did notice that I don’t have to hide all those popup questions when I go to certain websites with troubleshooting questions.
Sometimes I just desire the reading the text without all the visual distractions that is present in our modern internet experience.
What was your experience with a terminal based linux setup? I imagine it as something extremely lightweight at the cost of convenience.
My use case was basically managing a bunch of (headless) remote servers, so it worked really well.
My setup auto-ran tmux with a tiling config to give me 4 panes to work with when I logged in, with the top-right automatically launching my music player, and the bottom-right running cmatrix until I needed it to do something else. :)
Ah, it sounds similar to how I want to set up my headerless Raspberry Pi 5. I’ve been slowly learning tmux as well but it’s nice to have detached sessions. I’ll eventually add WeeChat as a sort of IRC bouncer for myself.
Right now it’s just hosting a simple file server and a copy of Wikipedia. I’ve also been looking at BashWrite and Bash Static Site Generator as a simple command line blog to host for myself.
I quite enjoy the text only work environment. It’s far less distracting :)
Did you try eww on emacs?
Emacs was my first thought too. I wasn’t sure it had a web browser too, but somehow it felt very likely
What OS is complete without one?
I haven’t actually tried anything involving emacs yet. I’m a bit intimidated to learn something new when I’m already focused on other things at the moment.
There’s only so many hours in the day to go down so many rabbit holes.
I can at least have a look at it, thanks for the suggestion.
If minimalism is what you’re looking for, Emacs is going to be your last station and I seriously recommend it to you.
With Emacs: I check my mail, read news, code, keep notes, work on spreadsheets, manage my to-do, use it as my calendar, talk with ai, chat on Matrix and Discord, manage all my git repositories.
You can use it to browse the web, listen to music and do about 1,000 other things. All from the same program, all with the same shortcuts.
Fully hackable, fully customizable, fully self-documenting and fully free.
That sounds interesting. It sounds like it’s modular so can be built around extensions?
I’ve been using nano as my editor but I feel like I’m getting to the point where I might benefit from something a little more powerful.
I’ll download it later and see about learning the shortcuts at first. I have a couple other things I’m focused on right now before I get deep into learning and customizing emacs.
Having mutliple purposes in one program does seem convenient and something I would probably enjoy.
Whilst you can download it and use it, I recommend you either start with a starter pack, or something like Doom or Spacemacs. Else, you’ll spend a couple of years before you get anything done.
Sounds good, I’ll check them out and see where I go from there :)
