Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Elinks : A fast text mode web browser

If you want to read long web pages and don't like to see the dirty graphics , install elinks. It is available on almost all distributions.
On ubuntu you can install it as follows

$ sudo apt-get install elinks

Once installed , open a console and type elinks. you will get the following




You can enter a URL and start browsing.

See the google page below.



Elinks is basically a console program and can be manipulated form keyboard. ( The mouse also will work ). You can access the elinks menu by pressing escape key. See the screen shot below.



The elinks browser support most of the modern web features. I enjoy browsing with elinks as it gives me extremely fast response while browsing the net.

Now let us enable some more features. Press escape and enable menus. Select Setup-> terminal options. Enable Vt100 frames , 256 colors and underline.




Now try gmail with elinks.



You can navigate the web page with arrow keys . There are some more short cuts that you can use. Have a look at the menus.

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