What is Reddit's opinion of
Links?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
29 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I agree, helping people with online security is bloat. That's why I use links as my browser. In just a ~5MB binary, it supports text and images! It truly is the future.
>and maybe online browsing
Basically, that's not really going to work. As far as I can tell, the notebook has 1 or 2 GB of RAM. The current browsers like Firefox often need more than 1 GB RAM these days. Then there is also the operating system. So basically, you're left with using stripped-down browsers like http://links.twibright.com/features.php with less functionality. That would not be fun for me.
You would probably get better performance with a Raspberry Pi 4.
Has a x11 backend (but compile time option, so depends if the distro enabled it). And it has only a "back" button useable with the mouse as far a I can see. No idea if that can be changed in the config somehow.
> Can i replace the bottom panel with something better or get rid of it totally?
Yo certainly can! You can configure to look and almost anything, if I may, you should pay a visit to r/unixporn & r/UsabilityPorn to take a look of some really cool setups, many, many of those running XFCE,
> how do i get the function keys to work (volume, brightness)
Check the Crouton Integration Extension.
> essential apps suggestions
- Emacs
jk
links is what elinks was forked from, but saw updates as recently as last November. I know in X11 links can display images, I assume this can be made to work in the console with framebuffer support. Worth a try anyway :).
EDIT: just checked, directfb support exists, along with a few other graphics drivers.
Did you see your post appear without being logged in on the Tor browser? Many subreddits block fresh account posts from being seen. Also, just fyi Tor browser and it's javascript are a serious threat to your privacy when using Tor. You'd be better off using Links.
> I was talking about links, but for some reason, links uses /etc/elinks.conf instead of /etc/links.conf
The setting that governs whether or not Links displays images apparently is "html-display-images", which can also be toggled under "View" > "HTML options" (cf. http://links.twibright.com/user_en.html#subsubch-html_options) - if your executable has been compiled with the graphic option and you run it with the -g switch. Works as expected for me using the outdated version 2.18 available in the Debian 10 repos I installed just now - both under X and in the console.
>God do I fucking hate how incorrect man elinks.conf is, like, cmon, can you guys just write simple documentation / a simple manual that actually works? Geez. (That's why people hate people who say RTFM cause the manual is sometimes very useless and that's sad.)
<em>ELinks</em> is a text browser (unmaintained since 2012) and according to your description the setting appears to be working just as described in the fine manual, i. e. the browser always displays the text "IMG" and not the filename, title, or alternate text when rendering <img> tags.
<em>Links</em>, which, according to Wikipedia (and much to my astonishment), has been updated just last May, works in both text and graphics mode and does display various image formats in the latter. Been years since I last tried that, now I guess I'll have to take it for a spin...
Not only Linux, Elinks is also for Windows and OSX. There is also Links, which has graphics mode.
Unfortunately, stuff like this takes them ages to implement. However, there are two ways you can ease it all for yourself:
- either building a completely new, simplified client that can actually provide proper accessibility (say, native system apps rather than CEF+HTML),
- or building/using existing BetterDiscord plugins to provide basic screen reader/braille display compatibility.
I could mention the special type of browsers that actually do support braille displays and simplify the output (one of them being my favourite, links), but those won’t provide sufficient level of interaction, especially in applications that are built ontop of modern javascript-driven dynamic pages.
There are some basic examples and attempts at said things, but nothing more than that. You might want to actually gather together and try to create your own client, because waiting for the dev team to implement this might take a few years. There are some people here who might help you out on that part.
The elinks browser is supposed to have limited Javascript support, but you may have to compile it yourself. I see rumors the links2 browser can support Javascript, too, but I cannot confirm that. The documentation for the links browser specifically states its own Javascript implementation is antiquated, broken and unsupported.
On the off-chance you are really looking for a testing or automation option, you might consider Selenium as well. To be clear, though, that's not a terminal-based application.
This is not an unreasonable question. One use case I've encountered: wanting to browse from the terminal to an old, poorly implemented web page for some strange device on a remote network. Worst case, I have to solve that problem with SSH and a SOCKS proxy, but some of those old, odd-ball interfaces won't work across tunnels either.
Depends to a certain extent on your platform: mine is Linux. I use Firefox with a proxy switch if I only want to jump in and out of Tor occasionally and for truly speedy surfing I have Links which is permanently routed via a Tor proxy. See http://links.twibright.com
>What text based browser do you recommend?
People argue about this a lot. ;-)
I like links because it has a -g option for graphical-mode viewing. w3m, however, is extremely configurable, scriptable, and can easily integrate other tools and scripts. As an emacs user, eww is surprisingly nice and highly scriptable (emacs-lisp), etc.
Mostly, I DDG. When I really feel the need for confidential search, I maintain a personal searx instance as a .onion service which I access from the links (-g) browser in an LXC container. The container gets destroyed when I finish.
Quick extra reply, because this is important, and I do it... but even I just overlooked it while telling you all this:
Accessibility.
I pride myself on having accessible pages. As in, blind people can fully access and use the sites I build. It's an extra hour or so of coding to do, and a little extra forethought and planning, plus maybe another 30 minutes of testing, but it is absolutely crucial.
Do not leave people out from using your site because you are lazy or don't think about it. That's just as bad as discrimination in my book, and knowing how little extra it takes me to make a page fully accessible for those who have vision problems, I look down on sites that don't think about it.
This means your page is a bit 'simpler' and doesn't do all the crazy stuff you know how to do. That's... a good thing, in my opinion. Simpler is easier on the user in the first place. Plus, it focuses you; sure, you may use a whiz-bang pretty transition, but you're only using 1, not 8. :)
The easiest way I can recommend to do this is to open your page in Links, or some other text-only browser. Think of someone using a braille terminal (yes, they're still around) and getting a single line of text speeding along to their fingers that they're reading. Or, a monotone voice speaking at 3x normal speed, reading out exactly what you're seeing in Links. Does it make sense? Can you navigate still? Can you get data off the site, or otherwise figure out what is going on?
If not, back to the drawing board! :)
>reduce internet addiction
Another thing I'll plug for that: the <code>links</code> browser. Has a non-terminal mode for most desktop OSes, successfully renders most modern stuff as long as it's an actual web page and not just a pile of JS. (To be fair, a lot of the internet now is just a pile of JS, but there are work-arounds like nitter.net for read-only twitter.)
I scanned through the top 10+ comments, and I have not seen anybody even touch on the fact that the OS itself and general overhead requires far, far more resources today than 20 years ago.
You can still run optimized/light weight browsers(Think Links, Opera Mini) on minimal RAM (less than 1GB) provided the platform/OS doesn't need more. You won't have a great experience and, as others have sated, a lot (almost all?) of the rich media will be gone, but it is do-able.
Also, we use RAM differently nowadays. It's cheap and unused RAM is wasted RAM, so we cache as much as possible to RAM. In the 90s, running out of memory wasn't an every day occurrence, but also wasn't uncommon and therefore developers were more judicious with what would be cached.
Derp, autocorrect. Coulda gone much worse 😅
Your distro should have links2 in its repo. I know Debian has it.
I think this is the official one: http://links.twibright.com/
I’m not sure if there’s a difference between links and links2. I’ll double check in a minute.
Cross posted from r/unixporn
WM: i3
Browser: Links
File manger: ranger
Spreadsheet: VisiData
Making good strides to going all terminal all the time. Ranger with previews (file manager), links with images (browser), and visidata (spreadsheet) have helped the push greatly. Gotta figure out how to theme VisiData, but tis a start.
> we can't implement that because there's a wave of browser luddites who refuse to use features developed more recently than the release of links
That wouldn't be many such features, last release of links is from september 2019.
The Links changelog shows steady development. Not sure about elinks, which looks like it stalled for a while, though Debian buster has a version bump, and someone has been maintaining minor patches for it on stretch. A quick search didn't turn up if development changed hands or what happened during the long gap in updates. Now I'm curious, but don't have time to look deeper.
Regardless, they both still work well for basic browsing, and have better interfaces and features than lynx, so they're my go-to options for minimal browsing until they quit working.
Like I said, it happens. Not sure if it's Baader-Meinhof or really becoming more prevalent. I know I'm guilty of it as well.
Screen readers handle CSS better than crap, invalid HTML. For the most part, it's discarded and the person just conceptualizes it through the nuance of the reader or braille terminal.
"list item one lorem list item one ipsum item two dolor end list"
Actually, a very good way to kinda 'test' how your code works in more austere environments is to try it in Links in text mode. If you can make sense of it there, it's a fair bet that screen readers, braille terms, and (arguably more importantly now) screen-scraping indexing robots can access your data.
Oh yeah, tools! I totally spaced on this lol
One huge tool that I've found helps me more than even Brackets has: Links. In text mode. No joke.
If your page is usable in Links, your page is usable anywhere. If your page is unusable in Links, you've denied access to your data by disabled people, low powered devices, scrapers (such as search spiders), and lowered your search ranking.
It's totally fine to have a wisbang site, but do it after it looks good in Links by using CSS techniques.
Quizás (y quizás no) tiene el artículo que estás buscando, me parece que esta versión no tiene absolutamente todo el contenido que tiene la versión "normal".
No sé que Sistema Operativo usás, pero si el que usás lo permite, fijate de acceder la página normal de La Nación On Line usando links2 con el flag "-g" para navegar en forma gráfica.
In addition to the other one mentioned, links is pretty awesome—with a no-frills web presence to match.
I used it for years as a text-only browser. Relatively recently I checked out graphics mode (the -g flag), and it works well where I need it.
yep.
> When Links was created, one of the main differences from Lynx was that Links supported JavaScript, even in text mode. It was controlled by the JavaScript 1.1 specification from Netscape Corporation. > > However JavaScript support was removed in release 2.1pre29 because it was buggy. In case it is restored, this appendix contains information on how to use it. The material in this appendix is not currently valid. > > To compile Links with JavaScript support, use the configure option --enable-javascript
Appendix 1: Links and JavaScript | Links user documentation
It doesn't work. :/
Linux has the Framebuffer, which allows for graphical programs on the console. There is are web browsers that runs on it (altohugh IIRC it doesn't do JavaScript) (or another one although IIRC it doesn't do JavaScript or CSS), and image viewers. I think even vlc and mplayer can play videos on the Framebuffer, although I don't know what the performance would be like.
Make sure you compile with --enable graphics and --enable-directfb, oh, and have directfb compiled in your kernel, and make sure you have the directfb and gpm packages installed. It works great.