Sorry, I will not talk about browsers in your list because I’ve tried them and my personal preference goes to chawan for these reasons:

• has CSS layout support
• has HTML5 support with various encodings
• can display Inline images in terminals that support Sixel or Kitty protocols (opt-in feature)
• offers basic JavaScript support via QuickJS (opt-in)
• supports HTTP(S), SFTP, FTP, Gopher, Gemini…
• has built-in viewers for Markdown, man pages, and directory listings
• has Incremental loading
• uses multi-processing, so several buffers can be loaded at once
• offer mouse support, bookmarks, and protocol handling extensible by users

If you want to check another option, there’s also brow.sh.

Hope this helps in your web terminal journey :)

I spent about 6 months several years ago without a WM. I used links -g and gpm to browse graphically (and with a mouse) using the framebuffer. At the time, lynx couldn’t do that.

I’ve been using Links for years. I rarely meet another Links user, as TUI web browser use is rare in and of itself, and most go to w3m or lynx from what I’ve seen.

TUI browsers are surprisingly capable of getting you around the web even with more limited features, as long as you mainly are focused on accessing public text documents and communications.

I know one of the main uses I saw some utilizing Links for was when it was recommended during the Gentoo installation process when you had to download a stage 3 tarball. Most just had another browser or used a different Linux iso during installation, but if you were installing via the tty, and had no other device with a web browser on it, that was (and still is) a solid choice for finding and downloading the needed tarball.

Anyways, just a bit of lore. My only complaint with Links is it doesn’t let you change the keybindings and they default to emacs. No shade to emacs, but I am and probably always will be a vim user, so there’s that. Other than that I’ll always be a big fan of Links.

I’m only a little bit familar with the TUI browsers. I’m also not sure about gemini and gopher support so you have to look that up on each project page, but I can give some general directions:

• Lynx is basically the oldest TUI browser, so probably not the best and no modern choice, but still maintained I think
• ELinks started as a fork of Links (and Links started as an alternative to Lynx, so both ELinks and Links are newer than Lynx). It has a lot of features and is actively maintained, so it’s decent I think. Probably better than Links (and Links is probably better than Lynx)
• Links2: no idea, just know that it exists. If it’s still actively maintained I would suggest comparing it to ELinks because they’re both probably similar (both related to but newer than Links))
• W3m is the one I’d recommend, it’s powerful and can be integrated more easily into other applications. For the classic TUI browsers, it probably comes down to the choice between w3m and elinks
• There’s also a modern project called Carbonyl which is essentially Chromium running in a terminal, so this one might be “better” than all of the above in terms of features and modern website compatibility. But again, it depends on what you want out of a TUI browser - if you only need something basic this is probably overkill. But I didn’t try it out.

This is super fun, you’re right. I’m on holiday so can’t check my PC right now, but i basically had most of a GUI in the terminal. Would be cool if all of the packages + some way to tie them all together could be released.