In these last days, my connectivity problems have grown in an accelerated way, currently counting on a free connection from the municipality, with the speed and security limitations that it entails. This limitation has forced me to reuse internet browsers for the Linux terminal, indeed, now I do my research from the console and using elinks, which I consider the best of its kind.
This of seeing myself in the obligation to navigate through a terminal, which is a practical way to access information for many, has reminded me of my times when I learned to configure servers without a graphical interface and that the only way we had to researching something was through these excellent tools.
What is elinks?
elinks is an advanced web browser for terminal, open source, written by mikulas patocka and text-based for UNIX-based operating systems, with functions (HTTP / FTP / ..), as well as support for frames and tables.
This tool is highly customizable and its functionalities can be extended through applications written in lua, perl, ruby o guile. It was born with the intention of improving its predecessor Links and little by little different functionalities were added, among which the use of tabs to navigate, the incorporation of bookmarks and the possibility of downloading stand out.
Elinks features
- Support for CSS y ECMAScript.
- Tabbed browsing.
- Muchos protocolos disponibles (local files, finger, http, https, ftp, smb, ipv4, ipv6).
- Autenticación (Autenticación HTTP, Autenticación de Proxy).
- Cookies persistentes.
- Interfaz de Menús y cuadros de diálogo bastante amigable.
- Soporte para scripts (Perl, Lua, Guile).
- Visualización de Tablas y Marcos.
- Colores.
- Descargas en Background.
- Translated into many languages.
- History, Bookmarks, Keyboard Shortcuts, Search Engine.
- Widely customizable.
- Easy installation and use.
- Among many other features.
How to install elinks?
The installation of elinks is easy and is present in almost all the repositories of the most popular distributions. You can access the official source with the following commands:
# git clone http://elinks.cz/elinks.git # cd elinks
Install elinks on Debian and derivatives.
# apt-get install elinks
Install elinks on Red Hat and derivatives.
# yum -y install elinks
Install elinks on Arch Linux and derivatives
# yaourt -S elinks
How to use elinks?
You can start elinks with
$elinks
or, start the browser directly on the web you want:
$ elinks blog.desdelinux.net
Due to all these characteristics, its easy handling, the advantages of being able to extend them according to my requirements, its high degree of customization and its easy installation is what has made me consider elinks: "Best web browser for Linux terminal«.
Have you used this web browser before? How about?