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.
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 :)
