W3M (thing)

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.