Over the past year as I’ve gotten into linux and self-hosting as a hobby, I’ve found an interest in using terminals and the “minimalist” feeling it gives me. Recently I found out there are terminal based web browsers and I’m really interested in the stripped down nature of web browsing it offers.
I already tried out W3M but I know there are a few others such as Lynx and Browsh.
I’m interested in hearing about other people’s experiences with terminal web browsers, the pro’s and con’s and also the reasons for using them.
My wanna-be-mr-robot friend and I were using lynx, elinks, and then browsh for a long time when we were experimenting with terminal-only linux laptop setups. Lynx and elinks are good for true text-only web browsing, but browsh is better if you want a more traditional web browser, but just inside a terminal window. It is actually running firefox headless in the background to render the pages, so it’s much more resource-heavy than others.
There’s no real advantage to a terminal browser if you aren’t being forced to use one, in which case “having a browser” is the advantage, it’s just aesthetics (especially if you enjoy customizing your terminal themes, since you can make your lynx match it).
Yeah I don’t see any huge advantage in using a terminal browser over a full featured browser. However, I did notice that I don’t have to hide all those popup questions when I go to certain websites with troubleshooting questions.
Sometimes I just desire the reading the text without all the visual distractions that is present in our modern internet experience.
What was your experience with a terminal based linux setup? I imagine it as something extremely lightweight at the cost of convenience.
My use case was basically managing a bunch of (headless) remote servers, so it worked really well.
My setup auto-ran tmux with a tiling config to give me 4 panes to work with when I logged in, with the top-right automatically launching my music player, and the bottom-right running cmatrix until I needed it to do something else. :)
Ah, it sounds similar to how I want to set up my headerless Raspberry Pi 5. I’ve been slowly learning tmux as well but it’s nice to have detached sessions. I’ll eventually add WeeChat as a sort of IRC bouncer for myself.
Right now it’s just hosting a simple file server and a copy of Wikipedia. I’ve also been looking at BashWrite and Bash Static Site Generator as a simple command line blog to host for myself.
I quite enjoy the text only work environment. It’s far less distracting :)