W3M

I have to agree with CowboyNeal and nutate.

W3M in an xterm is the best browser for Everything. (And pretty good for a lot of other stuff too, where the graphics aren't necessary.)

Pictures? None of those here, except on the home nodes, and if I really want to look at somebody's home node image I'll click on it and explicitly download it.

Fed up with typing your nodes in that wimpy text box in your browser? Use emacs instead. Or vi if you're so inclined. When nodes began to get longer here on E2, that little text box became woefully inadequate.

W3M never crashes and uses a whole lot less memory than Netscape or Internet Exploder.

All the standard HTML character entities work (though you don't get the Greek alphabet like you do on IE).

w3m (pronounced 'double-yew three emm') is a free text-based pager/web browser.¹

Written by Akinori Ito of Yamagata University, w3m (short for 'www wo miru', Japanese for 'view the www') was based on a pre-1991 file pager also by Mr. Akinori named fm ('file wo miru').² w3m is bilingual (Japanese/English) and was first released in 1995.

It has been confirmed that w3m runs under:

• Solaris 2.5
• SunOs 4.1.x
• HP-UX 9.x and 10.x
• Linux 2.0.30 and 2.2.9 with glibc 2.1
• FreeBSD 2.2.8 and 3.1
• EWS4800 Release 12.2 Rev.A
• Win 95/NT/2000/etc. (with cygwin)
• OS/2

win32 binaries exist.

A holy war of sorts exists between those who favour w3m over lynx and links (or one of the more obscure text-based browsers) -- here are a few points raised in favour of w3m (although some of these are currently in development / implemented in the competition):

• w3m can render tables
• w3m can render frames (they're converted to tables)
• w3m easily takes input from standard input
• w3m allows one to run cgi scripts locally to test html output
• w3m supports ssl using the openssl library
• w3m is small (and fast) -- the w3m binary on the Sparc workstation is under 300 KB (version beta-990512, gcc -O2). Compare this to lynx, weighing in at over 1 MB.

Although Mr. Akinori has no plans for w3m, development by other individuals continues -- Ambrose Li, for example, is responsible for implementing cookies. Source tarballs containing contributions are available from http://www.w3m.org/.

Source:

w3m home page:

http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w3m/eng/

timball's w3m page:

http://www.w3m.org/

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¹ A note regarding pronunciation: In the w3m faq, the author points out that '[w3m] doesn't rhyme with pteranodon'. No, I don't understand that either.

² Shro0m points out that 'www wo miru' is a highly unusual transliteration and that people rarely use 'wo' as the particle. 'www o miru' is much more common.