Ergebnis für URL: http://elinks.or.cz/documentation/manual.html#ecmascript #[1]ELinks RSS
[2]ELinks : [3]About | [4]Community | [5]Documentation | [6]Download | [7]FAQ |
[8]Feedback | [9]News | [10]Search
The ELinks Manual
1. Preface
Welcome! This is the entry point for the humble ELinks manual. It is by no means
complete, it is not even very homogeneous and it should eventually be superseded
by a complete ELinks Book. Until this happens you may also find it necessary to
refer to the manual page for a very quick reference, or the built-in
documentation available via the --long-help and --config-help ELinks command-line
arguments. The built-in documentation is sure to be up-to-date.
There was a complete (or, for the most part complete) manual for Links 0.82 at
one time, and you can still find it at:
* [11]http://links.sourceforge.net/docs/manual-0.82-en/index.html
While large parts of it do not apply anymore, you may still find some relevant
information there.
Authors:
* Jonas Fonseca
* Jose Luis Gonzalez Gonzalez
* Laurent Monin
* Miciah Dashiel Butler Masters
* Petr Baudis
* Peter Wang
and others.
Hold blameless the authors. Any lawful use is allowed.
2. Getting ELinks up and running
Installing ELinks should be pretty easy on most systems. Below is described the
whole process of configuring the compilation, compiling and installing.
2.1. Building and Installing ELinks
The quick guide for the impatient. Issue the following commands from the ELinks
source directory:
$ ./configure && make && make install
However you might consider to tweek a few compile time options before building
ELinks. You might also want to take a look at what libraries and programs are
required or recommended that you install.
2.2. Requirements
To successfully install ELinks all that is required is GNU make (version 3.78 or
later) and a C compiler. If you want to install directly from GIT it is also
required that automake and autoconf is installed on your system.
2.3. Recommended Libraries and Programs
To make use of many of ELinks features you will need to have some external
libraries and utility programs installed on your system. It is recommended to
have the following libraries and programs installed:
Dependency Description
Lua or Guile Makes it possible to write scripting plugins. See [12]the Elinks -
Lua interface for more info.
zlib 1.2.0.2 or later For handling gzip or deflate compressed documents both
locally and sent from server.
bzip2 Likewise, for bzip2 compressed documents.
LZMA Utils Likewise, for LZMA compressed documents. Version 4.32.5 should work.
XZ Utils does not work.
OpenSSL or GNU TLS For handling secure HTTP browsing.
pkg-config Needed for locating some libraries (at least GNU TLS and TRE)
GPM General Purpose Mouse for mouse support.
expat XML Parser Toolkit needed for XBEL support.
[13]TRE For regexp searching. Version 0.7.5 works.
libsmbclient Library needed for smb:// protocol support.
rxvt-unicode For terminal emulator which supports 88 colors.
xterm with 256 colors Program atleast patch level 179 or rxvt program from
version 2.7.9 for support of 256 colors. Newer PuTTY also has 256 color support.
libidn For internationalized domain names.
SpiderMonkey Mozilla's JavaScript engine for getting JavaScript/ECMAScript
support in ELinks. See also [14]notes on ECMAScript support.
When compiling, you also need the header files for the libraries. Most OS
distributors put a given library's headers in a package separate from the library
itself; this package usually has -dev or similar appended to its name.
2.4. Further reading
This installation guide is far from being complete. You are also advised to read
the README and the INSTALL files distributed with ELinks for further up to date
info on building and installing.
2.5. Tips to obtain a very small static elinks binary
Tips to obtain a very small static elinks binary suitable for mini distributions
Remove config.cache (previous CC may be cached):
$ rm config.cache
Use dietlibc (http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/) or similar stuff (uClibc, ...):
$ export CC='diet -Os gcc'
Use compilers flags to optimize for size:
$ export CFLAGS='-s -fno-inline -nostdinc -fomit-frame-pointer'
Note that if you don't use dietlibc, you definitively want to add -Os or -O2 to
CFLAGS; GCC 2.95 does not know -Os, and some say -O2 gives smaller executables
even for GCC 3.x.
Tip
If you use these CFLAGS on Cygwin and you get unresolved symbols (htons and suite
in particular), try removing -fno-inline parameter.
Disable some compile-time options:
$ ./configure --disable-ipv6 --disable-backtrace --disable-nls \
--enable-fastmem --without-zlib --without-bzlib --disable-xbel \
--without-lua --without-gnutls --without-openssl --without-x \
--enable-small --without-spidermonkey --without-gpm
You can disable bookmarks, globhist and more, too, if you want to.
Tip
Other configure options that can reduce the size
* --disable-backtrace disables internal backtrace code.
* --disable-nls disables i18n support.
* --enable-fastmem disables internal malloc() debugging and use alloca()
wherever possible.
* --enable-small forces to remove some text descriptions in options and keybind
stuff (regain 30Kb).
Dependencies over external libs must be removed using the related configure
options:
Option Description
--without-zlib removes libz dependency (compression)
--without-bzlib removes libbz2 dependency (compression)
--disable-xbel removes expat dependency (XBEL bookmarks support)
--without-lua removes liblua dependency (Lua scripting)
--without-gnutls removes libtls dependency (SSL support)
--without-openssl removes libssl dependency (SSL support)
--without-x removes libx11 dependency (restoring terminal title)
--without-spidermonkey removes libjs dependency (JavaScript)
--without-gpm removes libgpm dependency (mouse/console)
It seems GCC 2.95.x do not generate as small binaries as GCC 3.2.x with same
flags.
You can use an executable compressor like UPX [15]http://upx.sourceforge.net/.
Here are some results using gcc 2.95.3, dietlibc-0.23, and previous flags:
me$ ls -l src/elinks
-rwxr-xr-x 1 zas users 495100 Oct 20 15:53 src/elinks
me$ upx --best src/elinks
me$ ls -l src/elinks
-rwxr-xr-x 1 zas users 217946 Oct 20 15:53 src/elinks
Whow ! Around 200kb :)
Note
Details about the --enable-small configure option effects:
* it disables long descriptions of options;
* it disables textual descriptions of keybinding options;
* it reduces size of some HTTP errors messages;
* it disables fastfind feature, reducing performance, but also reducing a lot
memory usage, and a bit the executable size.
2.6. ECMAScript support?!
Yes, there is some ECMAScript support in ELinks. There isn't anything we could
call complete, but some bits could help with the most common ECMAScript usage
cases - help you (and then us ;) get into your banking account, pass through
those ignorant page redirects done by JavaScript code snippets and so.
ELinks does not have own ECMAScript parser and compiler; instead it reuses other
people's work (this may eventually change, see the bottom of this file). First we
aimed at the NJS engine, which is easy to install, small and compact; has nice
naming scheme, horrible calling conventions and very lacking documentation; is
not actively developed; and generally looks broken and extremely clumsy to work
with. So we instead went the way of the SpiderMonkey (SM) engine (property of
Mozilla), which is hard to install, bigger (mind you, it comes from Mozilla ;),
has ugly naming scheme but nice calling conventions, acceptable documentation, is
actively developed and ought to work.
2.6.1. Ok, so how to get the ECMAScript support working?
Some systems come with either the SpiderMonkey installed or as an option. It
would be good to test if you can take the easy path and let the system take care
of installation through a package system. Below are listed instructions on what
package you need to install on various systems (please help improve the list). If
all goes well you can proceed to rebuilding ELinks.
On Debian testing (Etch) or unstable (SID), run the following:
$ apt-get install libmozjs-dev
On Debian stable (Sarge), run the following:
$ apt-get install libsmjs-dev
Installing the -dev package will automatically pull in the library package.
Once this is done, rebuild ELinks. The configure script should detect the
SpiderMonkey library--check for this line in the features summary:
ECMAScript (JavaScript) ......... SpiderMonkey document scripting
After following these instructions on a Debian system, you are done and should
ignore the following directions.
The rest is only for non-Debian system.
Note that this procedure enables you to install SpiderMonkey, but in such a way
that it might not work with anything else but ELinks. It is unlikely that
anything else is ever going to use SpiderMonkey on your system, but if you want
to take the safe way, get SM and follow the instructions in src/README.html
instead. You will probably need to do some checkouting of bits of the Mozilla CVS
tree and so, have fun.
To get SpiderMonkey source, go at [16]ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/
and fetch the newest js- tarball there (js-1.5-rc6a.tar.gz at the time of writing
this; you may try the RPMs, but we didn't test them).
$ cd elinks
$ wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/js-1.5-rc6a.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf js-1.5-rc6a.tar.gz
Next, you need to patch it so that you will have any chance to install it as you
fetched it. Grab it in ELinks at contrib/js-1.5-rc6a+elinks.patch (if you have a
different version, still try to go ahead, you might have some success), then go
to the SpiderMonkey directory (called js) and apply it as
$ cd js
$ patch -p1 config.mk.t
$ mv -f config.mk.t config.mk
Now you can finally go for it:
$ make -f Makefile.ref
$ make -f Makefile.ref export
Now install it:
$ su -c 'make -f Makefile.ref install && (ldconfig -v | grep libjs)'
Check for:
libjs.so -> libjs.so
If you don't get such result, check that the library's installation path (e.g.
/usr/local/lib) is present in /etc/ld.so.conf (man 8 ldconfig).
If all went well, you can proceed to rebuild ELinks now. If something broke, see
you on #elinks @ FreeNode or in the mailing list. You may add your options to
./configure as usual; SpiderMonkey should be autodetected.
$ cd ../..
$ ./configure
Check for the following line in the features summary:
ECMAScript (JavaScript) ......... SpiderMonkey document scripting
Then run:
$ make
$ su -c 'make install'
Enjoy.
2.6.2. The ECMAScript support is buggy! Shall I blame Mozilla people?
Likely not. The ECMAScript engine provides only the language compiler and some
basic built-in objects, and it's more than likely that the problem is on our side
in the implementation of some of the HTML/DOM objects (perhaps we just haven't
bothered to implement it at all yet). So better tell us first, and if we think
it's not our fault we will tell you to go complain to Mozilla (better yet if it
does not work in the Mozilla browsers neither ;-).
2.6.3. Now, I would still like NJS or a new JS engine from scratch...
...and you don't fear some coding? That's fine then! ELinks is in no way tied to
SpiderMonkey, in fact the ECMAScript support was carefully implemented so that
there are no SpiderMonkey references outside of src/ecmascript/spidermonkey.*. If
you want to implement an alternative ECMAScript backend, go ahead - you will just
need to write an autoconf detection for it and tie it to
src/ecmascript/ecmascript.c, which should be easy. We await your patches eagerly.
2.7. Feature configuration file (features.conf)
This file contains various compile-time configuration settings, which you can
adjust below. You can fine-tune the ELinks binary to include really only what you
want it to. It acts as a front-end to the configure script in the sense that it
is possible to control any features in this file by passing arguments to the
configure script. In fact any arguments given to the script will overrule the
values set in this file.
There are still some things which are to be adjusted only directly through the
configure script arguments though, so check ./configure --help out as well!
All dependency checking is done by the configure script so even though a feature
is enabled here it is possible that it will be disabled at compile time if the
dependencies are not met. Check the features.log file generated by the configure
script to make sure.
2.7.1. Notes for users
All features that can be controlled using this file are already set to their
default values. The syntax used is hopefully familiar to most people.
# chars start a comment that runs until the end of the line.
The features are controlled by setting the various CONFIG_ variables to
either yes or no depending on whether it should be enabled or disabled. So in
order to disable bookmark support a line in this file should say:
CONFIG_BOOKMARKS=no
It is also possible to simply comment out the line in order to disable it.
Therefore, if the default doesn't suit you, you can either comment it out or set
it to the value you desire.
2.7.2. Bookmarks (CONFIG_BOOKMARKS)
ELinks has built-in hierarchic bookmarks support. Open the bookmarks manager by
pressing s. When bookmarks are enabled, also support for the internal ELinks
bookmarks format is always compiled in.
This is a favourite target for disabling in various embedded applications. It all
depends on your requirements.
Also read the "The Ultimate Bookmarks Guide" in doc/bookmarks.txt
Default: enabled
2.7.3. XBEL Bookmarks (CONFIG_XBEL_BOOKMARKS)
ELinks also supports universal XML bookmarks format called XBEL, also supported
by e.g. Galeon, various "always-have-my-bookmarks" websites and number of
universal bookmark converters.
Frequently, you know you will not need it, then you can of course happily
forcibly remove support for it and save few bytes.
Default: enabled if libexpat is found and bookmarks are enabled
2.7.4. Cookies (CONFIG_COOKIES)
Support for HTTP cookies --- a data token which the server sends the client once
and then the client sends it back along each request to the server. This
mechanism is crucial e.g. for keeping HTTP sessions (you "log in" to a site, and
from then on the site recognizes you usually because of the cookie), but also for
various banner systems, remembering values filled to various forms, and so on.
You can further tune the ELinks behaviour at runtime (whether to accept/send
cookies, ask for confirmation when accepting a cookie etc).
This functionality is usually quite important and you should not disable it
unless you really know what are you doing.
Default: enabled
2.7.5. Form History (CONFIG_FORMHIST)
The famous Competing Browser has that annoying thing which pops up when you
submit a form, offering to remember it and pre-fill it the next time. And yes,
ELinks can do that too! You will still need to also enable this manually at
document.browse.forms.show_formhist.
Many people find it extremely annoying (including pasky), however some others
consider it extremely handy and will sacrifice almost anything to get it. It will
not do any harm to have this compiled-in as long as you will leave it turned off
(which is also the default configuration).
Default: enabled
2.7.6. Global History (CONFIG_GLOBHIST)
This device records each and every page you visit (to a configurable limit). You
can browse through this history in the history manager (press h). Do not confuse
this with the "session history", recording history of your browsing in the frame
of one session (session history is the thing you move through when pressing back
and unback or which you see in the File::History menu).
Global history does not care about the order you visited the pages in, it just
records that you visited it, when did you do that and the title of the page.
Then, you can see when did you visit a link last time (and what was the title of
the target document at that time), links can be coloured as visited etc.
If you disable this feature, you will not lose any crucial functionality, just
some relatively minor convenience features, which can nevertheless prove
sometimes very practical.
Default: enabled
2.7.7. MIME
ELinks uses a MIME system for determining the content type of documents and
configuring programs for external handling. By default the option system can be
used to configure how media types are handled. More info about how to set up the
MIME handling using the option system can be found in the doc/mime.html file.
Below are listed some additional ways to do it.
2.7.8. Mailcap (CONFIG_MAILCAP)
Mailcap files describe what program - on the local system - can be used to handle
a media type. The file format is defined in RFC 1524 and more info including
examples can be found in the doc/mailcap.html file.
This is very useful especially for clean interoperability with other MIME-aware
applications and fitting nicely into the UNIX system, where this is the standard
way of specifying MIME handlers. If you are not interested in that, you can still
use the internal MIME associations system, though.
Default: enabled
2.7.9. Mimetypes File (CONFIG_MIMETYPES)
Mimetypes file can be used to specify the relation between media types and file
extensions.
Basically same thing applies here as for the mailcap support.
Default: enabled
2.7.10. Gzip and Deflate Decompression (CONFIG_GZIP)
This makes ELinks send "Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip" in HTTP requests and
decompress any documents received in those formats. It works with local *.gz
files as well.
Default: enabled if zlib is installed and new enough
2.7.11. Bzip2 Decompression (CONFIG_BZIP2)
This makes ELinks decompress local *.bz2 files. Also, ELinks sends
"Accept-Encoding: bzip2" in HTTP requests and decompresses any documents received
in that format, but this encoding has not been registered at
[17]http://www.iana.org/assignments/http-parameters, so most servers probably
won't use it.
Default: enabled if the library is installed
2.7.12. LZMA Decompression (CONFIG_LZMA)
This makes ELinks decompress local *.lzma files. Also, ELinks sends
"Accept-Encoding: lzma" in HTTP requests and decompresses any documents received
in that format, but this encoding has not been registered at
[18]http://www.iana.org/assignments/http-parameters, so most servers probably
won't use it.
To use this, first install [19]LZMA Utils. Version 4.32.5 works; 4.42.2alpha also
works and understands a newer LZMA file format. This version of ELinks does not
support LZMA SDK from 7-Zip.
Default: disabled
2.7.13. IPv6 Protocol Support (CONFIG_IPV6)
You know this thing that was designed to obsolete IPv4 but only pasky, weirdos
and projects supported with big funds really use. ;-)
Default: enabled if the system supports it
2.7.14. URI Rewriting (CONFIG_URI_REWRITE)
The goto dialog through which new URIs can be entered is an essential part of
browsing in ELinks. This feature makes the dialog more powerful by making it
possible to extend how entered text is handled through a set of rewrite rules
(see protocol.rewrite options).
There are two types of rules: simple and smart ones.
Simple rewriting rules are basically URI abbreviations, making it possible to map
a word to the full URI. They can also be used for hierarchic navigation to ease
moving from some nested directory to the parent directory or doing other stuff
with the current URI. For example, when you type gg into the goto dialog, you
will be materialized at Google's homepage.
Smart rules can take arguments and therefore enable more advanced rewriting. The
arguments could be search words to google for or a lookup query for a dictionary.
Eg. type gg:Petr Baudis king of ELinks cvs.
This feature is also available in a more powerful form in the Lua and Guile
extensions, so if you plan to or already use those, you won't miss anything by
disabling this feature (besides easier and better integrated configuration).
Default: enabled
2.7.15. BitTorrent Protocol Support (CONFIG_BITTORRENT)
The BitTorrent protocol is a protocol for distributing files in a peer-to-peer
(P2P) manner. It uses the HTTP protocol for communicating with a central server
and a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol for exchanging file pieces betweens peer
downloaders. The integrity of file pieces downloaded from peers are checked using
cryptographic hashing (SHA1).
Downloads using BitTorrent are started by first downloading a .torrent file with
the MIME type "application/x-bittorrent". The file contains information which
enables ELinks to ask a central server, called a tracker, for information about
other downloading peers and start downloading from and uploading to them.
At any time, an external handler can always be defined to take precedence of the
internal BitTorrent client and the internal client can always be forced by
prefixing the URI of the .torrent file with "bittorrent:"
Note
The BitTorrent support is still experimental.
Default: disabled
2.7.16. Local CGI Support (CONFIG_CGI)
ELinks can (like w3m or lynx) execute certain executable files stored on the
local disks as CGIs, when you target it on them (through a URI of the file
scheme). ELinks emulates the complete CGI environment, like the program would be
executed by a web server. See the protocol.file.cgi options tree for detailed
runtime configuration.
Some people just write their bookmark management application as Perl CGI script
and then access it from the web browser using this feature, not needing any web
server or so. Therefore, this is a great possible way to extended the browser
capabilities.
Even when you compile this in, you need to enable this yet in the configuration,
and even then only CGI files passing certain user-defined filters (path-based)
will be allowed to be executed (and there are certain other security barriers in
place).
Default: disabled, available if setenv() or putenv() is found
2.7.17. Data URI protocol (CONFIG_DATA)
The data URI protocol is defined in RFC 2397 and allows inclusion of small data
items as "immediate" data, as if it had been included externally.
A data URL might be used for arbitrary types of data. The URI
data:,A%20brief%20note
encodes the text/plain string "A brief note", which might be useful in a footnote
link.
Default: enabled
2.7.18. Finger User Information Protocol Support (CONFIG_FINGER)
The finger protocol is a simple protocol defined in RFC 1288. The server return a
friendly, human-oriented status report on either the system at the moment or a
particular person in depth such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail
address, full name etc. As well as standard user information, it displays the
contents of ".plan" file in the user's home directory. Often this file
(maintained by the user) contained either useful information about the user's
current activities, or alternatively all manner of humor.
It is most often implemented on Unix or Unix-like systems however due to security
and privacy reasons it is usually disabled or only allowed locally on the system.
Default: disabled
2.7.19. File Service Protocol (CONFIG_FSP)
File Service Protocol (FSP) is a very lightweight UDP based protocol for
transferring files. FSP has many benefits over FTP, mainly for running anonymous
archives. FSP protocol is valuable in all kinds of environments because it is one
of the only TCP/IP protocols that is not aggressive about bandwidth, while still
being sufficiently fault tolerant.
FSP is what anonymous FTP should be!
See http://fsp.sourceforge.net/ for more info.
Default: disabled
2.7.20. File Transfer Protocol Support (CONFIG_FTP)
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a software standard for transferring computer
files between machines with widely different operating systems.
Many sites that run FTP servers enable so-called "anonymous ftp". Under this
arrangement, users do not need an account on the server. By default, the account
name for the anonymous access is anonymous. This account does not need a
password, but users are commonly asked to send their email addresses as their
passwords for authentication (protocol.ftp.anon_passwd), but there is no
verification.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ftp .
Default: enabled
2.7.21. Gopher Protocol Support (CONFIG_GOPHER)
Gopher is a distributed document search and retrieval network protocol designed
for the Internet in RFC 1436. The need for gopher arose in in the early days of
the hypertext Internet where the number of documents that were being published in
campus and research environments could not easily be distributed using known
protocols like FTP because these documents were stored not in one place, but in
many computers connected to the Internet.
The support works much like local file browsing with directories (aka. menus) and
various file types that can be downloaded and viewed.
It is still very experimental and the CSO phone-book protocol is not implemented.
Default: disabled
2.7.22. NNTP Protocol Support (CONFIG_NNTP)
Network news transport protocol support makes it possible to access nntp and news
servers and read postings. It is still very experimental and is far from being
considered a "news reader".
It is possible to list news groups on a server, articles in a news group and
retrieve articles by their number or message-id.
Default: disabled
2.7.23. SMB Protocol Support (CONFIG_SMB)
ELinks supports browsing over the SMB protocol (URI smb scheme), using the
libsmbclient library as back-end. Therefore, in order to have this enabled, you
will need to install Samba (or at least just the libsmbclient part, if you can
install it separately).
This use of libsmbclient is believed to be immune to the command injection
attacks (CVE-2006-5925, bug 841) from which earlier ELinks releases (0.9.0 to
0.11.1) suffered.
Default: disabled
2.7.24. Cascading Style Sheets (CONFIG_CSS)
Simplistic CSS support. It is still very much in it's infancy so don't expect too
much. If you have use of background colors enabled more pages will have the
intended background color. Also quite a few additional text attributes are
applied. One example is highlighting of search words on Google's cached pages.
There are options to disable both imported style sheets to minimize network
traffic and whether to use CSS at all. Also a default style sheet can be defined
to control the basic layout in the HTML renderer.
Default: enabled
2.7.25. HTML Highlighting (CONFIG_HTML_HIGHLIGHT)
Makes it possible to view HTML source with the markup highlighted in colors
configurable using CSS. It also makes values of referencing attributes accessible
like the href="" attribute in elements.
The HTML highlighting uses components of an experimental DOM implementation still
in progress so enabling this feature will add a considerable amount of code to
the compiled binary. On the other hand it will help to debug what will hopefully
evolve into the next generation document renderer.
Default: disabled, requires that CSS is enabled
2.7.26. ECMAScript (JavaScript) Browser Scripting (CONFIG_SCRIPTING_SPIDERMONKEY)
By enabling this feature, certain parts of ELinks, such as the goto URL dialog,
may be extended using ECMAScript (aka. JavaScript) scripts. This can be useful to
optimise your usage of ELinks.
For example you can define shortcuts (or abbreviations) for URLs of sites you
often visit by having a goto URL hook expand them. This can also be achieved with
the URI rewrite feature (CONFIG_URI_REWRITE), however it is not as powerful as
doing it with scripting.
Default: enabled if Spidermonkey is found
2.7.27. Mouse Support (CONFIG_MOUSE)
ELinks may be controlled not only by keyboard, but also by mouse to quite some
extent. You can select links, menu items, scroll document, click at buttons etc,
and it should hopefully work. ELinks supports mouse control by GPM, xterm mouse
reporting and TWAIN's twterm mouse reporting.
It is generally nice convenience and doesn't cost too much. However, you can do
everything with keyboard as you can with mouse. Also note that the xterm mouse
reporting takes control over the terminal so that copy and pasting text from and
to ELinks has to be done by holding down the Shift key.
Default: enabled
2.7.28. 88 Colors in Terminals (CONFIG_88_COLORS)
Define to add support for using 88 colors in terminals. Note that this requires a
capable terminal emulator, such as:
* Thomas Dickey's XTerm, version 111 or later (check which version you have
with xterm -version) compiled with --enable-88-color.
* Rxvt, version 2.7.9 or later compiled with --enable-88-color.
You will still need to enable this at runtime for a given terminal in terminal
options, or set your $TERM variable to xterm-88color - then, ELinks will
automatically configure itself to make use of all the available terminal
features, while still acting sensibly when you happen to run it in an xterm w/o
the 88 colors support.
When enabled, the memory usage is somewhat increased even when running in mono
and 16 colors mode (the memory consumption can be especially remarkable when
rendering very large documents and/or using very large terminals). However, when
you actually run it in the suitable terminal, it looks really impressive, I'd say
marvelous!
Default: disabled
2.7.29. 256 Colors in Terminals (CONFIG_256_COLORS)
Define to add support for using 256 colors in terminals. Note that this requires
a capable terminal emulator, such as:
* Thomas Dickey's XTerm, version 111 or later (check which version you have
with xterm -version) compiled with --enable-256-color.
* Rxvt, version 2.7.9 or later compiled with --enable-256-color.
* Recent versions of PuTTY also have some support for 256 colors.
You will still need to enable this at runtime for a given terminal in terminal
options, or set your $TERM variable to xterm-256color - then, ELinks will
automatically configure itself to make use of all the available terminal
features, while still acting sensibly when you happen to run it in an xterm w/o
the 256 colors support.
When enabled, the memory usage is somewhat increased even when running in mono
and 16 colors mode (the memory consumption can be especially remarkable when
rendering very large documents and/or using very large terminals). However, when
you actually run it in the suitable terminal, it looks really impressive, I'd say
marvelous!
Default: disabled
2.7.30. True color (CONFIG_TRUE_COLOR)
Define to add support for True color. Note that only terminal capable to show it
is konsole from kdebase-3.5.4. This mode eats a lot of memory.
Default: disabled
2.7.31. Ex-mode Interface (CONFIG_EXMODE)
The ex-mode interface makes a prompt available when pressing :. The prompt can be
used for entering actions like :goto-url and configuration file commands.
The code is still very experimental and lacks much work such as tab completion.
Default: disabled
2.7.32. LEDs (CONFIG_LEDS)
These are the tiny LED-like indicators, shown at the bottom-right of the screen
as [-----]. They are used for indication of various states, e.g. whether you are
currently talking through a SSL-secured connection, what is the current input
mode (normal or insert), JavaScript errors etc.
Default: enabled
2.7.33. Document Marks (CONFIG_MARKS)
Makes it possible to set marks in a document and then later jump to them kind of
like how fragments in URIs work. It is currently only possible to jump to marks
set in the current document.
Default: enabled
2.7.34. Debug mode (CONFIG_DEBUG)
Assertions are evaluated and will core dump on failure. Some extra sanity checks
are done, and some errors will cause core dump instead of just a message.
Internal memory leak detection is activated (memory usage will grow), and every
allocation/reallocation/free operations will be slower due to extra tests. Lists
sanity checks are enabled, so list operations are slower. Hot-key debugging is
enabled, it highlights redundant hot-keys in a menu.
This option should be _always_ used by beta testers and developers, it helps to
detect many issues. Binary packages maintainers should not use this option in
normal situation.
Default: disabled
2.7.35. Fast mode (CONFIG_FASTMEM)
This option provides a way to generate a faster and smaller binary of a _stable_
version of ELinks. Please do not use it with unstable releases (unless memory
footprint, performance and/or binary size are major issues for you).
It disables all assertion tests and sanity checks effectively reducing safety. It
disables internal memory allocation routines, directly calling libc functions (so
it's much faster, but memory allocation issues and memory leaks will be not
detected). It defines fmem_alloc(), and fmem_free() to be in fact alloca() and
nothing, providing much faster allocations in routines where they are used
Default: disabled
2.7.36. Own C library functions (CONFIG_OWN_LIBC)
Enable this to use the various C library stub functions that is part of the
portability layer instead of those available in the C library on the system.
It will make the binary slightly bigger and should only be used for testing the
portability layer.
Default: disabled
2.7.37. Small binary (CONFIG_SMALL)
Reduces the size of the binary but also disables a few memory consuming
optimizations to make the program much lighter when running.
Part of the size reduction is due to various help text not being compiled in
which will affect usability. Also the disabled optimization will make ELinks run
slower.
See doc/small.txt for more information about how to reduce the size of ELinks.
Default: disabled
2.7.38. Unicode UTF-8 support (CONFIG_UTF8)
By enabling this option you get better Unicode support. At present only some
parts of ELinks are influenced with this. It includes DOM, plain, HTML renderer
and user interface. Beside normal Unicode characters there is support for
double-width characters (like Japanese, etc.).
Some features of Unicode are not handled at all. Combining characters is most
visible absence. Some features are partially supported. Like line breaking
between double-width characters. There is no other detection for determining when
to break or not. Character conversions are still incomplete for ECMAScript
strings (bug 805), local file names, and IRIs (RFC 3987).
Default: enabled
2.7.39. Back-trace Printing (CONFIG_BACKTRACE)
Once upon a time, a disaster happens and ELinks crashes. That is a very sad event
and it would be very nice to have some means how to diagnose it. In the crash
handler, ELinks prints out various helpful things, however the truly important
information is _where_ did it crash. Usually, users do not have gdb installed and
can't provide a back-trace. However, ELinks can print a back-trace on its own, if
the system supports it (currently, it is implemented only for glibc). It is not
always accurate, it is useless when the ELinks binary is stripped and it still
misses a lot of important information, but it can be sometimes still an
indispensable help for the developers.
You should keep this, unless you will strip your ELinks binary anyway, you know
you are not going to report back any failures and you care about each single
wasted bit.
Default: enabled if the libc supports it (only glibc)
2.7.40. Disable Root User (CONFIG_NO_ROOT_EXEC)
Browsers are scary monsters used for traveling around in an even more scary world
where people indifferently throw garbage files at you and threaten your perfect
world. Altho' ELinks is a small monster compared to most browsers, it can still
bite your head off and some might consider running it as the root user extremely
dangerous. To prevent such usage simply enable this feature.
Default: disabled
3. Frequently Asked Questions
This is an attempt to capture some of the questions that appear once in a while
on the mailing list or on IRC.
3.1. I rebuilt/upgraded/reconfigured ELinks and restarted it, but it looks like nothing
has changed!
ELinks instances connect together so that they share the cache, bookmarks,
cookies, configuration, etc. Only the "master" ELinks instance does any real work
and any other ELinkses you run will only connect to this instance. So when you
want to restart ELinks, make sure you have no other ELinks instances running.
Alternatively, you can use the -no-connect parameter to make ELinks always run
standalone, or create a parallel group of ELinks instances with the -session-ring
N parameter (where N is a number larger than zero). Be aware of that in those
cases ELinks won't touch any configuration, bookmark, cookies, etc. files. You
can force that with the -touch-files parameter, but beware that this can result
in data loss! (For example, when two master ELinks instances try to save the
bookmarks, and you add a bookmark to each of those, only one of the bookmarks
survives.)
3.2. How does cutting and pasting work?
The reason why normal cut and paste does not work is that ELinks requests all
mouse event info even if it is compiled without GPM. Therefore it is necessary to
hold down the Shift key when cutting or pasting text. If you do not need to use
the mouse for navigation you can disable mouse support by passing --disable-mouse
to configure.
3.3. How does the "Move" button on the bookmark manager work?
First you need to mark all the bookmarks (or folders) you want to move. This can
be done with the Insert key if you're using the default key-bindings. An asterisk
will appear near all marked bookmarks. Now move to where you want to have the
stuff moved to, and press the "Move" button.
3.4. What's up with the navigation in the various managers?
The managers use list boxes. To navigate (assuming you're using a default
key-binding configuration) use Space to open and close the folders.
3.5. Why are there so many Links flavors?
Please refer to the [20]history page to read about the various flavors and the
differences between them.
3.6. Which one to use?
If you want a fast, stable, and feature-thin text browser, use [21]Links-0.99.
Main drawbacks include: No HTTP-auth support and no persistent cookies (i.e. they
die when all instances of Links are closed).
If you want additional features, including HTTP-auth, persistent cookies, and
on-the-fly compression, try ELinks. (Note: links-0.9x and ELinks versions > 0.3
do not share executable name or configuration files so you can safely run these
on the same machine.)
If you want the option of graphics mode, use [22]Links2 or [23]Hacked Links. Be
aware that some people have reported the latter as hard to configure/compile. You
cannot run either of these with Links-0.9x on the same system without hacking the
compile-time configuration.
3.7. What are the Ki (kibi) and Mi (mebi) units?
They are binary units defined by [24]the International System of Units. Examples:
Unit Definition
One kibibit 1 Kibit = 2^10 bit = 1024 bit
One mebibyte 1 MiB = 2^20 B = 1 048 576 B
3.8. How can I get 256 colors?
First, you must enable it in the feature.conf file before compiling.
Second, you must run ELinks on a terminal that supports 256 colours:
* [25]Thomas Dickey's XTerm, revision 111. XTerm must be compiled with
--enable-256-color.
* Recent versions of [26]PuTTY.
Third, you must set the TERM environmental variable to xterm-256color before
running ELinks.
Note
Only 16 colors on The Linux console
Although the Linux frame-buffer supports 256 (or more) colors, the Linux console
driver does not; therefore, console applications are still limited to 16 colors
on the Linux console, frame-buffer or not.
3.9. What User-Agent header does ELinks send?
The older ELinks versions (up to 0.4.3) send:
ELinks ($version; $osinfo; $textmode_dimensions)
The new ELinks versions (from 0.9.0 on) send:
ELinks/$version (textmode; $osinfo; $textmode_dimensions)
You should therefore check against something like /^ELinks[\/ ]/, since more
fields can be added inside the parenthesis in subsequent versions. Note that
users can change their User-Agent through the options system.
3.10. ELinks doesn't erase characters from the screen when it should!
When you scroll a web page, you may see ELinks leave some characters on the
screen even though it should have erased them. Pressing Ctrl+L usually removes
these droppings until you scroll again. There are a few possible reasons:
* ELinks 0.11.* in a UTF-8 locale. By default, ELinks guesses the charset of
the terminal from the environment variables LANG, LC_CTYPE, and LC_ALL.
ELinks 0.11 versions do not support UTF-8 as this charset. To use ELinks 0.11
on a UTF-8 terminal, you should instead enable UTF-8 I/O via the Setup ->
Terminal options dialog box, and choose a charset from Setup -> Character
set. This limitation has been removed in ELinks 0.12pre1.
* Web pages may use nonspacing combining characters or Unicode control
characters that ELinks does not recognize as such. This happens especially on
[27]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges, where the server
generates U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK characters. ELinks 0.13.GIT now has some
support for these characters; see [28]ELinks bug 824.
* Some versions of the Terminal application in Mac OS X appear to have a
setting that makes line-drawing characters take up the space of two ASCII
letters. ELinks does not expect this. To avoid the incompatibility, either
disable the setting in the Terminal application or select "No frames" in the
Terminal options dialog box of ELinks.
4. Introduction to the World of ELinks
The goal of this introduction is to explain the basic concepts in ELinks, give an
overview of how to get started and serve as an entry point to many of the
(undocumented) features of ELinks. It won't tell you all the details, but should
hopefully give you an idea of how things work and make it possible for you to
even figure out how to go further.
Although ELinks is text-based, the user interface has many of interaction methods
normally found in graphical environments. There are menus, dialogs with buttons
and hierarchic list boxes with folders. Care has been taken to make the
interaction between various dialogs consistent, so the controls will quickly
become familiar to new users.
The user interface can be controlled using both mouse and keyboard, but currently
it is only possible to configure keybindings. Looking back, the key-controls have
been more advanced than the mouse support, but during the 0.10 prereleases the
mouse support has been much improved. You will now find find stuff like
contextual menus when right-clicking in different document zones.
4.1. Overview of the User Interface
The main user interface of ELinks consists of the document view and dialog bars
displaying the information such as the title of the currently viewed document,
all opened tabs and the browsing status. The 3 bars are elaborated further below.
The most important dialogs that you will meet include the Main, Link and Tab
menus and the different managers. The menus serve as entry points to the actions
available from different contexts, while the managers let you check the state and
control the various subsystems, such as loaded cookies and the global history.
The utility menus and the manager tools are investigated further below.
The document viewer in ELinks provides a feature-rich set of ways to browse
documents. That is, multiple options exist for navigating, searching and
displaying documents and you will hopefully figure in time what works best for
you. The basic browsing possibilities are presented below.
ELinks is highly configurable, so if there is something that you would like to
change, it is most likely possible. The best overview of the many options are
given in the elinks.conf(5) man page. Keybindings are discussed in the
elinkskeys(5) man page. It is not always up-to-date, so you should also check the
keybinding manager and the overview of all the configured keybindings given in
the Help -> Keys dialog. The Keys dialogs serves as a good introduction to the
most common keybindings.
4.2. The Title, Tab and Status bar
The title bars main purpose is to display the title of the current document.
Documents bigger than can be displayed with the current screen size are divided
into subpages. In this case the current document position is indicated in the far
right of the title bar as a suffix to the actual document title. The syntax is: (
current-subpage / total-subpages ), an example is (4/9) that indicates the 4th
subpage of 9 subpages.
The tab bar by default is only visible when 2 or more tabs are open. It is
divided into slots containing the trimmed title of the tabs' loaded document.
Between each tab is a separator. The current tab is highlighted and all tabs that
has not been viewed after being loaded are highlighted as fresh. Tabs are
explained in details in the tabs.txt file.
The status bar has multiple purposes. Most of the time it will contain the URI
(and title) of the currently selected link. If a link is followed, connection
information is shown in the status bar. When using cursor routing, the status bar
will show the coordinates of the cursor when a link is not followed.
4.3. The Main, Link and Tab Menus
The Main Menu gives you access to many of the features of ELinks via submenus and
serves as a good entry point for performing actions on the different objects of
interest, such as links, documents and tabs. The Link menu and Tab menus are more
specialized and targeted to a specific context, such as link handling or managing
the tab bar. Actually, the Link Menu is accessible from the Main Menu as a
submenu.
Once you have familiarized yourself with the menus, you will have a good chance
at gradually learning the most common keybinding, since all the configured
keybindings are shown as right aligned text. Menu entries can also be quickly
accessed using hotkeys. Hotkeys appear highlighted in the menu entry text. For
example the key-combo "Alt-v i" will open the document info dialog accessible
from the View sub menu in the Main menu.
4.4. The Managers
The managers let you control the state of subsystems, such as cookies and the
global history. They are accessible from the Tools or Setup submenu in the Main
Menu. The managers consists of an area showing a hierarchic listbox and buttons
at the bottom. Below, a view of the cookie manager is shown.
+------------------------- Cookie manager -------------------------+
| |
| [-]- bugzilla.elinks.cz |
| | |-- BUGLIST |
| | `-- LASTORDER |
| [+]- kerneltrap.org |
| [+]-*dictionary.reference.com |
| [+]-*bjork.com |
| [-]- www.google.com |
| `-- PREF |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| [ Info ] [ Add ] [ Edit ] [ Delete ] [ Save ] [ Close ] |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+
Each item is either a folder or a leaf. A folder is displayed with a [-] or [+]
before the name telling whether the folder is currently open or closed. Nested
items are displayed indented compared to the folder they are nested in. In the
cookie manager example above "bjork.com" is a folder and "PREF" is a leaf.
Items can be "marked", which makes it possible to select a group of items and
perform an action on them, such as deleting all marked items. If any item has
been marked the currently selected item is ignored when performing the action.
Marked items are displayed with an asterisk (*) prefixing the name.
The buttons make it possible to perform actions either on selected or marked
items or on all items in the manager. Buttons named Clear and Save are performed
on all items; Clear will delete all items and Save will update the runtime state
file associated with the manager in the ~/.elinks/ directory. Most buttons
presses will query you before completing the action.
At any time, both the currently selected item and button are highlighted. The
same goes for marked items. Most manager dialogs also maintains the state, so
that when you reopen the manager later it will have the same items selected and
the same folders opened or closed.
The basic default controls for managers are the following:
Keys Action
Up/Down Select the item above/below.
* Toggle marking of a item.
Space Open and close folders.
Left/Right Select the button to the left/right.
Home/End Select the first/last item.
Enter Press the currently selected button.
Esc Close the manager dialog.
Some managers also supports searching, either by pressing the Search button or by
pressing /. By searching the empty string, all hidden items from the previous
search will be shown again.
4.5. LED status indicators
As an optional feature it is possible to have tiny LED-like status indicators
shown at the bottom-right of the screen. They are used for displaying an overview
of the current browsing state, ie. whether you are currently talking through a
SSL-secured connection, what is the current input mode (normal or insert),
JavaScript errors etc.
An example display may look like: [SIJP--]. Each position in the LED display is
associated with the following state:
Symbol Description
S Whether an SSL connection was used.
i/I The state of insert mode for text-input form-fields: i means modeless, I
means insert mode is on.
J A JavaScript error has occurred.
P A JavaScript pop-up window was blocked.
- Unused.
- Unused.
- generally indicates that the LED is off.
The above information is also available in the LED dialog available by either
clicking on the LED display or via the Help menu.
4.6. Navigation
ELinks provides various ways to navigate documents. Depending on how documents
are structured, it can be a great help to change navigation style. The navigation
styles can roughly be divided into page-oriented, link-oriented and
screen-oriented. They overlap in many ways, so this separation is mostly used as
a mean to present them.
4.6.1. Page-Oriented Navigation
This involves scrolling documents horizontally and vertically. Documents can be
scrolled page-wise, where the next or previous subpage will be displayed. It is
also possible to scroll documents in steps, either line-wise (vertically) or
column-wise (horizontally). The step size can be configured and by default is 2
lines and 8 columns. Alternatively, whole documents can be scrolled to the start
or the end.
The basic default controls:
Keys Action
Insert/Delete Scroll up/down line-wise. (vertically)
PageUp/PageDown Scroll up/down page-wise.
[/] Scroll left/right column-wise. (horizontally)
Home/End Scroll to the start/end of the document.
4.6.2. Link-Oriented Navigation
For hypertext documents, access to the links makes it more practical to navigate
by jumping between links in the document. There are two ways to do this; either
you can move between links relationally or by number. Using relational link
navigation it is possible to focus the next/previous link or move in a
directional manner to the link in a certain direction such as left/right/up/down.
In order to navigate using link numbers, you have to first toggle link numbering
on; this will prefix all links with a number using the notation [number]. [23]
indicates link number 23. When link numbering is enabled, pressing any number key
will pop up a "Go to link"-dialog where the complete link number can be entered.
By pressing Enter the entered link number will be focused, but only if it is a
valid link number.
Note: it is also possible to jump to links by searching the link text; check the
documentation on searching.
The basic default controls:
Keys Action
Up/Down Move to the previous/next link.
. Toggle link numbering.
Enter/Right Follow the current focused link.
No keys are by default configured for directional link navigation.
4.6.3. Position-Oriented Navigation
Positional navigation (sorry, bad word) uses the either the position of the
cursor or the mouse click to navigate the document. If you are familiar with the
w3m text-browser you will be familiar with cursor routing. Basically, you move
the cursor around -- kind of like a mouse -- in the document area of the user
interface. When the cursor is over a link, the link is highlighted, and when the
cursor moves outside the current document view, it will cause the document view
to scroll.
The possibilities when using the mouse to navigate the document depend on what
terminal you are using. In some terminals, it is possible to scroll by using the
mouse wheel. Scrolling is however also possible by clicking in the edge areas of
the document view. Highlighting links can be done by clicking on a link but
waiting to release the mouse button until the link is no longer under the mouse
pointer.
No keys are by default configured for cursor routing.
4.6.4. Forms
The status bar will indicate the type and name of the field.
Input text/Password fields
These will be displayed as ________. Note that passwords will be obscured
using * characters. Status bar will display something like "Text field,
name q", or "Password field, name password" for password fields.
Textarea boxes
These will be displayed as multiple lines consisting of _. Status bar will
display something like "Text area, name comment"
Buttons
These will be displayed as [ Go ]. Status bar will display something like
"Submit form to .."., "Post form to ..". for submit buttons.
Checkboxes
These will be displayed as [ ] or [X]. Status bar will display something
like "Checkbox, name c, value 1". To set one just press ENTER on it.
Radio buttons
These will be displayed as ( ) or (X). Status bar will display something
like "Radio button, name radio1". To set one, you may use ENTER.
Select lists
These will be displayed as [first item____]. Note that if multiple
attribute is used, these are displayed as a group of checkboxes instead.
Status bar will display something like "Select field, name list" To select
one entry, press ENTER, then navigate using UP/DOWN, then press ENTER
again.
4.7. Searching
Searching is by default available by pressing /. This will open a search dialog
with a input text field for entering the search terms and checkboxes to control
how searching is performed. You can indicate whether matching should be case
sensitive and whether regular expressions or normal searching should be used.
It is also possible to make an incremental search, also called type-ahead
searching. You can search either the whole document text or only link text. The
latter can be useful if you see a link deep inside a page and want to get to it
quickly.
Matches of the search term will be high-lighted. After having performed document
text search all matches will be high-lighted. To get rid of this high-lighting
you have to "search for the empty string", that is open a search dialog and just
press Enter in the input field.
Previous search words are saved in the search history, so they can easily be
found and used later. Browsing the history will replace the current entered
search terms.
The basic default controls for searching are the following:
Keys Action
/ Open search dialog
? Open search dialog for backwards searching
# Start incremental link text search
#/ Start incremental document search
n/N Show next/previous match
Tab Show next match (only for incremental searching)
Up/Down Insert previous/next search word from history (only when the input field
is selected)
4.8. Hints and Odd Features
Note: This is still a work in progress and from here on an below everything is
marked TODO!
* Numerical action prefixes. Example: 3 jumps down three links.
* How to move forward in the document history (u).
* Toggling color modes, plain/html and image link rendering.
* Link numbering.
* Insert mode in text-input form-fields.
* Menu searching.
5. The Ultimate Bookmarks Guide
Glad to see you again, mortal. Now, we are going to learn about bookmarks - how
to use them, how to maintain them, and also something more about the file formats
and maybe even about the code structure later. But don't fear, we won't burden
you with it, just stop reading when you already know enough.
In order to read this, you need some common sense, the ability to start ELinks
and some idea about what's a Web document, a URL address and knowledge like that.
If we ever mention some keys here, please note that you can rebind almost any
action to another key which you like more - then you must obviously imagine your
own key in place of that. Below, we will list all actions, options and so on
related to bookmarks. We won't tell you how to rebind the keys, though; another
document will take on that.
Somewhat out-of-order, a very frequent FAQ: In order to move bookmarks around,
you need to mark them first - press Insert or * (if you use the default keymap)
to do that.
5.1. The Bookmark Manager
Basically, almost everything is going on in the so-called bookmark manager.
That's a special dialog window, which contains a listing of all the bookmarks you
ever told ELinks to remember and it lets you to do with them anything you would
ever want to do with them.
You launch the bookmark manager by pressing the s key in standby (standard) mode.
You should see a big empty space (bookmarks will slowly appear there as you will
add them) and couple of buttons shriveling at the bottom. So, as a start, move
with the right (or left; both will do) arrow to the button Add bookmark and fill
in the input fields it offers to you. I mean, you can type something like "ELinks
homepage" to the first field, then move down by e.g. the down arrow and fill
"http://elinks.cz/" to the second field. Then, bravely press enter and watch the
bookmark popping up at the top of the vast area reserved for bookmarks.
Repeat this step few times. Now, you can move between bookmarks by the up and
down arrow, jump to the location any of them points to by the Goto button, change
it by the Edit button, delete it with the Delete button and so on. When you'll
become bored, press the escape button and you're free again!
5.2. The Ancient Forests
It's not very convenient to have all the bookmarks mixed up - soon, you will get
lost in them. Thus, in ELinks you can categorize them to various folders,
subfolders, subsubfolders and so on, then you can expand and back enfold them and
so on.
In order to create your first folder, use the button Add folder and fill the
first input field. You can safely ignore the URL field, ELinks will do the same.
POOF and you see it - it has that strange [+] or [-] thing there. If it has [+]
near, it's enfolded, while when it has [-] near, it is expanded, while you can
change that by pressing the spacebar.
In order to add a bookmark into a folder, move on the item of the folder (it must
be expanded) or onto any bookmark inside of the folder and simply do the usual
Add bookmark job. You can also move the bookmarks around, obviously. Before
pressing the Move button, you need to first mark all the bookmarks (or even
folders) you want to move using the Insert or * key--asterisk will appear near of
all marked bookmarks--and then move to where you want to have the stuff moved to.
Separators can be inserted as well, using Add separator button, or by entering a
special bookmark with "-" as title and no url.
5.3. Searching for a needle in the haystack
Of course, you can search in the bookmarks. Just use the Find button - for
convenience, you have the current document's URL and title pre-filled there, and
for convenience only up-up-enter-down-down sequence is enough to have the
playground clean. Then, just fill a substring of what you are looking for, and
the bookmarks will be filtered so that only the matching ones are shown.
(Actually, currently it will not be filtered but the cursor will only jump to the
first matching bookmark below the current cursor position - and it will NOT wrap
around. The exact behaviour changes time by time and hasn't been stabilized yet.)
5.4. File formats
ELinks supports two bookmark formats: the native format and a generic bookmark
exchange format called XBEL. Each of those formats has its pros and cons, which
we shall discuss below. You can switch between then by changing the option
bookmarks.file_format.
However, first please note that ELinks CANNOT read Links bookmarks directly.
Importing Links-0.9x (or Links-1.x) bookmarks is easy - it is just matter of
changing all the | (pipe) characters to tabs. There is a script for that in the
contrib/conv/ directory. Importing Links-2.xx bookmarks is not so easy; in fact,
the scribe knows of no way of doing that at the time of writing this, so this is
up to you to figure out (if you do, please tell us so that we can add it here).
Perhaps you might find a way to convert Links2 bookmarks to the XBEL format,
which can then be loaded in ELinks.
5.4.1. Native file format
This is the preferred bookmarks format, which is also used by default. The
bookmarks file is ~/.elinks/bookmarks, in a simple format:
'\t' [ '\t' ['\t' ] ] '\n'
\t represents a tab character, \n represents a newline character. [Square
brackets] denote optional parts. The and fields should be obvious.
contains the depth level of the entry - by that, ELinks can unambiguously
figure out the bookmarks hierarchy:
Bookmarks structure: Depth:
,-- The Pasky's C Bestiary 0
[-]- Wonderful things 0
| |-- Christmas Carol in l33tsp34k by L.M. 1
| [-]- Beautiful Potato Camera Shots 1
| [-]- Gallery of Scary Images of Jonas Fonseca 1
| |-- Jonas torturing gdb 2
| [-]- Urgh 2
| | `-- Jonas consuming Tofu 3
| `-- Jonas with crashed ELinks 2
|-- Slides from Witek's hack-patch show 0
`-- Miciah's English Grammar Spellbook 0
is a string of characters. Currently, two flags are supported:
Flag Description
E This folder is currently expanded. (No effect for non-folders.)
F This entry is a folder. The part is usually empty.
Separators: these are special bookmarks with "-" as title and no url.
Pros
Naturally, ELinks handles the native format the best, easiest and most
reliably.
Cons
It is unlikely that you could use the native format anywhere else than in
ELinks.
To use the native format, set bookmarks.file_format = 0.
5.4.2. XBEL file format
The XBEL file format support was added at some point during the 0.4 development
by Fabio Boneli. It has never been complete and has plenty of troubles, but
generally, it works at the basic level. The bookmarks file is
~/.elinks/bookmarks.xbel (thanks to a different filename, you can have both XBEL
and native bookmarks saved in your ~/.elinks directory).
We shall not describe the XBEL file format here,
http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/xbel/
is the authoritative resource on that. It also contains list of some of the
applications supporting the format. Basically, you will be probably able to
convert from/to the XBEL format to/from most of the other widely used formats, so
this way you can import your bookmarks to ELinks from basically anything.
Pros
XBEL is the gateway to the rest of the bookmarks world.
Cons
The support for XBEL is incomplete and there are known bugs. Especially,
national character sets are basically not supported, so ELinks will most
likely get it wrong if you have any non-ASCII characters in your
bookmarks. Generally, the XBEL support should be considered experimental
and you shouldn't rely on it. It could trash your XBEL bookmarks file so
make regular backups.
To use the XBEL format, set bookmarks.file_format to 1.
5.4.3. Usage hints
As already noted above, probably the best usage pattern is to use XBEL for
importing/exporting your bookmarks to/from ELinks and the native format for
regular operation. Of course, if you want to synchronize your bookmarks in ELinks
and some other XBEL-supporting gadget and you are brave, you can use XBEL as your
exclusive bookmark format - the choice is upon you.
Regarding the bookmarks synchronization, there is one important note. ELinks
saves your bookmarks each time you added one through the a shortcut (add-bookmark
action) or when closing the bookmarks manager if you made any changes or when
quitting ELinks. However, ELinks reads your bookmarks only ONCE, during the
startup. This behaviour may change in the future (tell us if you need a way for
ELinks to re-read the bookmarks file), but this is how it is done now.
Actually, you may now ask "So how do I convert bookmarks between the two
formats?". It is quite easy. ELinks simply follows the current value of
bookmarks.file_format whenever loading/saving the bookmarks.
So, e.g. if you normally use the native format but you want the bookmarks to be
saved in the XBEL format once, change bookmarks.file_format to 1, then cause the
bookmarks to be resaved (e.g. by doing some simple change, like adding a trailing
space to some bookmark's title or so), then change the bookmarks.file_format
value back to 0.
It is a little more complicated if you normally use the native format but you
want to import bookmarks from the XBEL format once. You again change
bookmarks.file_format to 1, then cause the bookmarks to be reloaded. That
involves saving the configuration, quitting ELinks _completely_ (that means
closing/killing all instances of it you have running), then restarting it and
changing bookmarks.file_format to 0. Then save the configuration again and cause
ELinks to resave the bookmarks.
Agreed, this all strange dances are quite clumsy, likely some simple wizard-like
interface for switching the bookmarks formats will be introduced in the future.
So far, we have had no reports from our users that anyone wants to switch their
bookmarks format frequently, so this is not too high on our TODO list. So be sure
to tell us if you would like this process to be simplified rather sooner than
later.
6. The Wonders of Tabbed Browsing
In this information age with our stream of consciousness constantly being
dispersed by links to different resources on the Net, it is a challenge to keep
track of where you are going. The need for being able to access several pages in
parallel arises. Tabbed browsing gives you an easy way to browse multiple sites
in parallel.
If you are not already familiar with the concept of tabbed browsing you can think
of a tab as a separate browsing context with its own history and various other
browsing state information, such as search word and document loading. Whenever
you stumble upon a link to a document that you want to follow without leaving the
current document, you can open it in a new tab. This makes it possible to more
easily jump between pages on the Net and removes the need for running more than
one ELinks for that purpose.
Options related to tabs are located under "User Interface -> Window Tabs" in the
option manager. In the configuration file the naming prefix is "ui.tabs".
Tabbed browsing has been supported since version 0.9.0 and is fairly complete.
The documentation on tabs is therefore divided into two chapters: a general
introduction and an introduction to advanced topics.
6.1. Introduction to the basic actions involving tabs
6.1.1. The tab bar and the tab menu
The current state of all opened tabs are displayed in the tab bar. The tab bar
will, by default, become visible when more than one tab is open, but this is
configurable. For each open tab, the document title will be shown, possibly
truncated. The current tab is highlighted. The tab bar will also display a load
meter for tabs that are loading documents. Finally, any tab that has not been
selected since its document was loaded will be marked as "fresh" by using a
different coloring scheme.
The tab menu gives access to tab specific actions along with some other useful
document specific actions. So even if you haven't configured keybindings for all
actions, chances are you will find it in the tab menu. By default, it is opened
by pressing e.
6.1.2. Creating new tabs
When creating new tabs, it is possible to specify whether to create the tab and
make it the current active tab or if the tab is to be created "in the background"
-- that is, without it taking over the focus.
Tabs can be created either with or without specifying a desired first document to
load. That is, you can open links or submitted forms in a new tab or just open a
new tab. Depending on your configuration, the latter will load the configured
homepage in the newly created tab or simply leave the tab blank with no loaded
document.
By default, t will open a new tab and T will open the current link in a new
backgrounded tab. You can configure keybindings for opening a new tab in the
background and opening the current link as the active tab.
6.1.3. Switching between tabs
By default, it is possible to switch between tabs by using < and > to select the
previous and next tab, respectively. When positioned at the leftmost tab, and
switching to the previous tab, the tab switching will perform a wrap-around so
that the rightmost tab will be selected. The wrap-around behaviour is
configurable.
6.1.4. Closing tabs
Tabs can by default be closed by pressing c. It is possible to optionally have a
confirmation dialog pop up when closing a tab to avoid accidental closing. To
complement closing of the current tab, it is also possible to close all tabs but
the current one. No key is by default configured for this; the tab menu, however,
provides this ability.
Note: downloads initiated from a tab are in no way tied to that tab, so tabs can
be closed and the download will not be affected.
6.2. Advanced topics involving tabs
6.2.1. Moving tabs
Newly created tabs are always positioned as the rightmost tab, but it is possible
to move the current tab either to the left or the right. The default keybindings
have them bound to Alt-< and Alt->. Note, however, that there are problems
recognizing those keybindings when using XTerm, so you might want to rebind them.
6.2.2. Saving and restoring tabs
Several features use bookmarks to save tabs; they will create a folder and
bookmark therein the currently displayed document of each tab:
* You can explicitly command all tabs to be bookmarked. This will ask you for a
folder name in which the tabs will be bookmarked.
* At startup and shutdown tabs can automatically be bookmarked in order to save
and restore the browsing state. Note that when restoring, all history
information will be gone. It is possible to configure both tab saving and
restoring via options in "UI -> Sessions".
* As a mean of crash protection, tabs can periodically be saved so that it is
later possible to reconstruct opened tabs. In case of a clean shutdown
periodically saved tabs will be removed.
7. Marks (the lite edition)
So, were you ever reading this huge 300-pages specification heavily
cross-referencing itself, jumping around and getting a headache when looking for
the place where you stopped reading the last time?
Were you doing something similar in C code, but praising vi for document marks?
ELinks can do them, too! For vim non-users:
7.1. What it is?
When you place a "document mark" (just "mark" from now on), you place an
_invisible_ anchor at the current position in the document. You can place several
such marks --- each mark is identified by a single character (any reasonable
character will do). Then, you can just happily browse around aimlessly (but see
below) and when in the same document again, you can return to any of the marks in
the file again. That will restore your position in the file at the time of
placing the mark.
You can place a mark by the "m" key followed by the mark character. You can go to
a mark by the "'" (apostrophe) key followed by the mark character. E.g., you can
place a mark named "a" in the file by pressing "ma", then return to it anytime
later by typing "'a". You can of course change those shortcuts at any time to
anything you wish in the keybindings manager.
Short summary: you can place a mark (e.g. z) in a document by pressing "mz" and
then go back to it anytime later by pressing "'z".
7.2. Restrictions
Currently, only A-Za-z characters are valid marks.
Only one mark named "a" (or anything else) may exist at a time, so if one puts a
mark "a" in a first document and set another mark "a" in a second document,
ELinks will simply replace the former one.
ALL the document marks are always local to the document. I.e. the vim text editor
has an extension that makes the capital-letter marks to be global to the whole
program and going to such a mark will make it to open the right document. This is
not implemented in ELinks _yet_.
Contrary to vim, ELinks doesn't support numbered marks (jumping to the last n
documents in history) nor the special "'" mark (jumping to the last mark). Yet.
There is no way to get a listing of all marks set in a document. Yet.
7.3. Marks lifespan
I already hinted something about another restriction regarding aimless browsing.
The lifespan of document marks depends on rather ill-defined and (for an average
mortal) mostly non-deterministic technical conditions.
Generally, marks _always_ survive when not moving away from the document or when
moving only in the session history (and unhistory). That means, if you go back
and the "unback" to the document, you will find your marks safely in place. If
you follow a link from the document (or typed an address to the Goto URL dialog)
and then go back (by pressing the right arrow or through the File menu), your
marks are safe too. These are in fact by far the most common usage cases for the
marks, so most of the time it will just work as you expect. That's a good news.
The bad news is that in all other cases, nothing is guaranteed. It might work if
you get back to the document by any other means (by following some link or typing
its address to the Goto URL dialog), or it might not. It might be possible to
achieve two instances of the document inside a single ELinks, each with its own
set of marks. However, again, generally it will work as expected - this paragraph
serves only as a disclaimer in cases it doesn't. Don't rely on it.
Marks never survive over ELinks restarts. If you quit your ELinks completely and
run it again, the marks you placed will be no more. No exceptions. Well. In some
cases, it might appear that they survived, but that just means you did not quit
your ELinks _completely_ --- if you run multiple ELinks instances under a single
user on a single system, they "join" together and you must quit (or kill) them
all to get rid of the damn thing. But that's a different story.
8. URL Shortcuts in ELinks
One extremely useful and convenient feature in ELinks, which may not be very well
known, is so-called URL rewriting. If you give ELinks a URL (by passing it on the
command line, through the -remote magic device or, most frequently, by typing it
to the Goto URL dialog), it has the ability to mangle it in certain ways before
processing it. This mangling is called URI rewriting.
8.1. What it does
The URI rewriting can expand certain URL shortcuts to complete URLs. For example,
if you type sd to the Goto URL dialog, it will be rewritten to:
http://www.slashdot.org/
first, and then loaded. /.'s front page will be displayed.
Further, if you type g elinks to the Goto URL dialog, it will be rewritten to:
http://www.google.com/search?q=elinks&btnG=Google+Search
and then loaded, therefore, a Google search for the keyword elinks will be
performed. Note that you can separate the g by either a space or a colon, so
g:elinks will do the exact same thing.
A large number of those shortcuts are already defined for you. You can browse
Protocols :: URI Rewriting :: Dumb/Smart prefixes in the Options Manager for a
complete listing of already defined shortcuts (press the [Info] button on a
shortcut to see what it will be rewritten to). See below for details on how to
enable or disable this rewriting and how to define your own shortcuts.
8.2. How it works
All the URI rewriting can be controlled by options in the protocol.rewrite option
tree.
In the case of sd, a URI rewriting mechanism called dumb prefixes is used. If
protocol.rewrite.enable-dumb is true, ELinks looks at the contents of the
protocol.rewrite.dumb.* tree, and if it finds option protocol.rewrite.dumb.sd, it
will use its value as the target URI.
Therefore, more generally speaking, if ELinks looks at
protocol.rewrite.dumb., and if it exists, will replace the entered
URI with it. These dumb prefixes can be used as a kind of alternative bookmark
systen - if you want to have fast access to a certain site and you don't want to
spend a while navigating the bookmarks manager, you can just fire up the Goto URL
dialog, type the shortcut and there you go.
A dumb prefix can contain %c, which will be replaced by the URI of the current
document. This is used, for example, in the arc dumb-prefix, which provides a
shortcut to the Wayback machine at archive.org.
In the case of g, a slightly different URI rewriting mechanism called smart
prefixes is used. If protocol.rewrite.enable-smart is true, ELinks looks at the
contents of the protocol.rewrite.smart tree and, if it finds option
protocol.rewrite.smart.g, it will use its value as the target URI.
The difference is that the smart prefixes can take arguments and reference them
in the target URI. As with dumb prefixes, %c in the URI means the current
address. Additionally, %s will be substituted by the whole string following the
prefix (elinks in the g example above; %s is by far the most frequently used
expansion), while you can reference individual space-separated arguments with the
codes %0 thru %9. Finally, if you want a plain % to the resulting URI, use %%.
Note that the prefix searched in the protocol.rewrite.smart tree is everything in
the typed address up to the first space or colon (so bug:123 and bug 123 are
identical). These prefixes are generally useful for searching anything very fast
- be it Google (g:foo, gi:foo, gr:foo, ...), ELinks Bugzilla bugs (bug:1234), the
RFC database (cr:foo), or the Czech-English dictionary (czen:foo). The only limit
is your imagination.
8.3. Alternative URI rewriting mechanisms
In the past, before this was implemented, Lua scripting did the job. And you
still have complete control over the URI in the internal scripting goto-url hook.
The advantages are clear - you get complete control over the URI and you can do
many more interesting things with it. For example, there are some very advanced
CVSweb and Debian package database URI prefixes implemented in the sample Lua
hooks file. The one disadvantage to this is that you must have Lua scripting
enabled in order to make use of it, and many users don't have Lua installed.
9. The Terminal Setup
ELinks uses neither (n)curses nor termcap/terminfo, so unless you are using a
terminal that is known by ELinks and have a built-in configuration (see below for
a list), it might be required that you do a little configuring of how your
terminal should be handled. The easiest way to do this is by using the Terminal
Options dialog located in the Setup submenu of the Main menu.
It is possible to have configurations for multiple terminals as long as the TERM
environment variable -- used to distinguish terminals from one another -- is set
to something different for each terminal. So be sure to set TERM to different
values for two terminals that cannot share the same configuration. For example,
always setting TERM to xterm-color can lead to problems if you run ELinks under
the Linux console. This is because the Linux console does not support underlining
and ELinks will not know that underlined characters will have to be color
highlighted so they stand out.
In short, ELinks does not use termcap or terminfo. ELinks uses $TERM, but only to
distinguish between terminals in its own configuration. That is, you need only
configure your terminal within ELinks: Go to the Setup menu and select Terminal
Options. If $TERM is set to screen when you configure ELinks' terminal settings,
ELinks will remember to use those settings when $TERM is screen.
9.1. Options
Apart from the last charset option configurable through the Setup -> Character
Set submenu in the Main menu, the rest can be configured using the Terminal
Options dialog.
9.1.1. Terminal type
It maps roughly to the terminal type, such as Linux console, XTerm, VT100 etc. It
matters mostly when drawing frames and borders around dialog windows. As already
mentioned, it also turns on certain features which try to compensate for
"missing" terminal capabilities when drawing. Special highlighting of underlined
text if underlining is not supported is one such thing.
Type Notes
No frames Dumb terminal type / ASCII art
VT 100 frames Works in most terminals
Linux or OS/2 frames Linux console / you get double frames and other goodies
KOI-8
FreeBSD FreeBSD console
The default is to assume dumb terminal/ASCII art.
9.1.2. Color mode
The color mode controls what colors are used and how they are output to the
terminal. The available color modes are:
Mode Color codes
Mono mode Only 2 colors are used
16 color mode Uses the common ANSI colors
88 color mode Uses XTerm RGB codes (if compiled in)
256 color mode Uses XTerm RGB codes (if compiled in)
The default is to use mono mode.
9.1.3. Switch fonts for line drawing (aka 11m hack)
This is related to the drawing of frames and window borders controlled by the
option above. It controls whether to switch fonts when drawing lines, enabling
both local characters and lines working at the same time.
This boolean option only makes sense with the Linux console. Off by default.
9.1.4. Restrict frames in cp850/852
This is related to the drawing of frames and window borders controlled by the
option above. If enabled, it restricts the characters used when drawing lines.
This boolean option only makes sense with the Linux console using the cp850/852
character sets. Off by default.
9.1.5. Block cursor
Move cursor to the bottom right corner when done drawing, if possible. This is
particularly useful when we have a block cursor, so that text colors are
displayed correctly. If you are using a screen reader you do not want to enable
this since the cursor is strategically positioned near relevant text of selected
dialog elements.
This boolean option is off by default.
9.1.6. Transparency
Determines whether or not to set the background to black. This is particularly
useful when using a terminal (typically in some windowing environment) with a
background image or a transparent background. If this option is enabled the
background will be visible in ELinks as well.
Note that this boolean option makes sense only when colors are enabled. On by
default.
9.1.7. Text underlining capability
This boolean option controls whether to underline text or instead, enhance the
color.
Note: not all terminals support text underlining, so it is off by default.
9.1.8. UTF-8 I/O
This boolean option controls outputting of I/O in UTF-8 for Unicode terminals.
Note that currently, only a subset of UTF-8 according to the terminal codepage is
used. This is off by default.
9.1.9. Character Set
Codepage of the charset used for displaying content on terminal.
The value System (which is the default) will set the charset according to the
current locale. The default is to use the charset of the current locale.
9.2. Terminal Configurations
Built-in configurations exists for the following terminals:
* linux
* vt100
* vt110
* xterm
* xterm-color
* xterm-88color
* xterm-256color
The last two configurations requires that support for either 88 or 256 colors is
compiled in to xterm.
GNU Screen is VT100-compatible, so select VT 100 frames. GNU Screen also supports
colors just fine, so select 16 colors, or, if you are running Screen within a
terminal emulator that supports 256 colors and you have compiled both Screen and
ELinks to support it, choose 256 colors.
10. Introduction to MIME handling
At some time along the 0.4 prereleases, ELinks replaced the old Links file
configuration system with its own one. Now, the configuration is stored in
elinks.conf, much more complete and featuring a new syntax. You can set most
options from the UI (so usually there is no need to deal with elinks.conf), and
that used to be true for setting MIME handlers and extensions as well; but now
the associations menu is gone temporarily, forcing you to set the handlers from
the configuration file.
The comments provided within elinks.conf for the MIME options are not much
helpful, and those options may seem a bit obscure or confusing at first. This
document is a basic introduction to setting of MIME associations for ELinks. If
you want to know how to automatically launch a program to view some kind of file
(like images), then read on. Some basic knowledge of MIME is recommended.
10.1. Handling MIME types, the ELinks way
10.1.1. What are MIME types and why may you want to use them?
If, while browsing with ELinks, you need to display files that it can't show
(like images or PDF documents), then you will likely want to pass them to other
programs that are suitable for this task. While you may do it manually (saving
the file to disk, running the auxiliary program to show it and then removing the
file when finished), ELinks provides a method to do this automatically using MIME
types.
ELinks usually knows what the MIME type is for any file (which is a kind of
description of its format), thus you only need to specify how to manage the MIME
types for the files you want to open. If you don't tell ELinks how to manage a
given MIME type then it will show you on screen the contents of the file (as if
it was ASCII text) instead of calling an external program to show them.
10.1.2. Associating files to MIME types
If the file is fetched from a web server then this web server should tell ELinks
what its MIME type is, so you should have generally no need to care about it.
However, the web server might send an incorrect type, or you may be retrieving it
by FTP or from your local filesystem, so sometimes ELinks needs to guess it.
The easiest method to guess a MIME type for a file is to just look at its name
trusting it was given the right extension. ELinks supports this, letting you to
specify a type for any given extension.
10.1.3. Managing a given MIME type
This usually means specifying programs to open files of this type and the
conditions in which those programs may be used. For instance, you may want to use
zgv (a popular svgalib image viewer) when you are using the text console, but xli
(a image viewer for X) when running the X window system.
Binding it to a handler
Instead of directly attaching a program to a MIME type, ELinks lets you associate
an abstract handler to each type. Then you can specify which programs implement
the handler and how are they used.
For instance, you may create an image_viewer handler and assign it to MIME types
image/jpeg, image/png and image/gif. Then you would associate to image_viewer the
programs you would like to use for viewing images and the details on how to use
them. This is less cumbersome than repeating all these details for each MIME
type.
10.1.4. Specifying the details for a handler
There are three issues to specify for a handler: the program associated to it,
whether you want confirmation before using it and whether you want the terminal
to be blocked while it is being used.
When specifying any of these issues, you must tell ELinks the situation in which
it gets applied, which is typically either the text console or the X window
system. So you can specify that you don't want confirmation before running the
program when running X, and that you want it otherwise. Similarly, when you are
attaching a program (name it foo) to this handler you must tell if it's for X or
not (you can attach a second program for the other choice if you want).
Attaching a program to it
You must tell ELinks the exact command for running it (with any options
you wish). In place of the filename you must enter %.
Choosing whether you want confirmation before applying it
This is rather simple. If you choose not to do so, then the handler will
be automatically called upon when you demand ELinks to show something
attached to this handler. Otherwise, if you ask for confirmation, you will
be prompted to open it with a external program, with additional choices
that include cancelling the operation and viewing it with ELinks. E.g: you
may use this option for programs written in C so that you may always
choose if you want to read the source with ELinks, or if you want to save
it, or if you want to use indent to display it with less.
Choosing whether to block the terminal
If you don't want to allow going back to ELinks (or any other program from
the same terminal) before the external program ends, then you should ask
to block the terminal.
10.2. Setting up elinks.conf
If you have old configuration files from old ELinks versions or from Links, then
you may use the conf-links2elinks.pl script (which is placed at contrib/conv/ on
the source distribution) to convert them to the new format. If you don't use it
you will need to edit the configuration file, and here you will find how.
10.2.1. Associating a file extension to a MIME type
You can still do this with the UI, from the the Setup->File Extensions
submenu.
If you want to do so from the configuration file, enter set mime.extension.ext =
"type", replacing ext with the appropriate file extension, and type with its MIME
type. E.g. you may want to have set mime.extension.jpg = "image/jpeg".
10.2.2. Defining a handler
For each handler you must define three items, specifying in what context the
value of the item should be applied. You must enter set
mime.handler.handler-name.item.context = value, replacing handler-name with the
name for the handler you are defining, item with the item you are defining for
this handler, context with the context this item value is to be applied, and
value with the value you want to assign to the item. You must do so for each of
the available items: program, ask and block.
The value for program is a string with the exact command you want to be issued to
view the file, placing % were you would put the file name. The values for ask and
block are either 0 (no) or 1 (yes). Available contexts include unix and
unix-xwin, which mean UNIX text terminal and X respectively (others can be os2,
win32, beos, riscos, ...). The latter does not mean you are running ELinks from
X, just that the DISPLAY variable is set so that ELinks may run an X program.
To illustrate it, here is an example. Suppose you want to define the image_viewer
handler which should be used to view images. The configuration file may look like
this:
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix.ask = 1
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix-xwin.ask = 0
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix.block = 1
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix-xwin.block = 0
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix.program = "zgv %"
set mime.handler.image_viewer.unix-xwin.program = "xli %"
In this example the image_viewer handler uses the svgalib image viewer zgv when X
is not available, and the X image viewer xli when it is. The terminal would be
blocked when X is not available and it would not be when it's available. Finally,
ELinks would ask for confirmation before using the handler only with X not
available.
10.2.3. Associating a MIME type to a handler
Just enter set mime.type.class.name = "handler", replacing class with the class
for the mime type, name with the specific name within that class, and handler
with the name for the handler you want to assign to the MIME type. E.g. you may
want to have set mime.type.image.jpeg = "image_viewer".
11. Managing External Viewers with Mailcap
This document describes the support for Mailcap (RFC 1524) in ELinks. It does not
describe the mailcap format. There are plenty of documents on the Web that does
this. Google and thou wilt find. ;)
11.1. A Short Intro to Mailcap
Mailcap is a file format defined in RFC 1524. Its purpose is to inform multiple
mail reading user agent (MUA) programs about the locally-installed facilities for
handling mail in various formats. It is designed to work with the Multipurpose
Internet Mail Extensions, known as MIME.
ELinks allows MIME handlers to be defined using its own configuration system, so
why support mailcap? It can be seen as an alternative or simply as a supplement
for setting up MIME handlers in ELinks. Mailcap files are present on most UNIX
systems--usually in /etc/mailcap--so this makes it possible for ELinks to know
how to handle a great variety of file formats with little configuration. To be
able to use mailcap, it has to be compiled into ELinks. This is the default. If
you don't need mailcap support, just configure ELinks with the flag:
--disable-mailcap.
11.2. Parameters to Mailcap Entries
The code has been ported from Mutt and thereby inherits some of its various
features and limitation.
The following parameters are supported:
Parameter Description
%s The filename that contains the data.
%f The content type, like text/plain.
The following parameters are not supported, since they do not really make much
sense for a non-MUA program:
Parameter Description
%n The integer number of sub-parts in the multipart
%F The "content-type filename" repeated for each sub-part
%{ parameter} The "parameter" value from the content-type field
11.3. Reading of Mailcap Files
Mailcap files will be read when starting ELinks. The mailcap files to use will be
found from the mailcap path, a colon separated list of files similar to the $PATH
environment variable. The mailcap path will be determined in the following way:
* From the value of the mime.mailcap.path option in elinks.conf; for example:
set mime.mailcap.path = "~/.mailcap:/usr/local/etc/mailcap"
* From MAILCAP environment variable.
* If non of the above is defined, the mailcap path defaults to
~/.mailcap:/etc/mailcap.
11.4. Fields
Since mailcap handling is primarily for displaying of resources, all fields like
edit, print, compose etc. are ignored.
Note: Test commands are supported, but unfortunately, it's not possible to
provide the file when running the test. So any test that requires a file will be
considered failed and the handler will not be used.
Unfortunately, there are no native support for the copiousoutput field. The field
basically mean needs pager. So it is handled by appending a pipe and a pager
program to the command. The pager program will be read from the PAGER environment
variable. If this fails, test are made for common pager programs (/usr/bin/pager,
/usr/bin/less and /usr/bin/more in that order). So if you define png2ascii as
your handler for image/png and specify copiousoutput then the executed command
will be "png2ascii |/usr/bin/less" if less is your pager or present on your
system.
11.5. Mailcap Configuration
Apart from the mime.mailcap.path option, you can configure if mailcap support
should be disabled. The default being that it is enabled. To disable it just put:
set mime.mailcap.enable = 0
in elinks.conf.
It is also possible to control whether ELinks should ask you before opening a
file. The option is a boolean and can be set like this:
set mime.mailcap.ask = 1
if you would like to be asked before opening a file.
11.6. Some Sample Mailcap Entries
Below are examples of how to specify external viewers:
# Use xv if X is running
image/*; xv %s ; test=test -n "$DISPLAY";
text/x-csrc; view %s; needsterminal
# Various multimedia files
audio/mpeg; xmms '%s'; test=test -n "$DISPLAY";
application/pdf; xpdf '%s'; test=test -n "$DISPLAY";
application/postscript; ps2ascii %s ; copiousoutput
12. Managing remote ELinks instances
Some programs provide the ability to pass URIs to external programs. When
stumbling upon a reference to a page you want to see, it is sometimes a kludge to
copy and paste it into ELinks. This is where -remote can be a nifty solution.
When invoking ELinks with the -remote argument, it does not start a new instance,
but instead connects to an already running ELinks, making it possible to control
that ELinks instance. The -remote command line switch takes a command consisting
of the action to invoke and any parameters to the action. Commands must begin
with a nonempty sequence of ASCII alphabetic characters followed by optional
whitespace and an opening parenthesis. They must end with a closing parenthesis
optionally followed by whitespace. Here is an example for opening freshmeat.net
in a new tab:
$ elinks -remote "openURL(http://freshmeat.net/, new-tab)"
When running this command in a terminal, you will see a small delay before ELinks
returns. If no running instance was found, it will return with the error message:
ELinks: No remote session to connect to.
All URLs passed to the openURL() commands can be URL prefixes, so the command
above could have simply used "openURL(fm, new-tab)".
12.1. Limitations and outstanding issues
Remote control is implemented using the intercommunication socket created in
~/.elinks/, so the command has to be run on the same machine as the instance you
want to control; or put differently: the two ELinkses need to share a file system
that supports socket files, which rules out usage of -remote over NFS. This also
implies that the ELinks instance you want to control should be started without
passing -no-home nor -no-connect.
The built-in -remote support is to some degree compatible with the one Mozilla
provides (http://www.mozilla.org/unix/remote.html), but with some homebrew
extensions added and few unsupported features. All the supported actions are
documented below.
Under some circumstances, use of the -remote control can cause ELinks to become
unresponsive. This is cause by the current key press and mouse focus being
redirected to new tabs or dialogs opened by the -remote action.
12.2. Remote Actions
The command syntax is case-insensitive. For readability, we use the casing in the
listing of supported commands.
CAPTION: Table: Mozilla -remote compatible commands.
Command Description
ping() Checks for existence of a remote instance. Makes it possible for scripts
to query if remote controlling is possible.
openURL() Prompts for a URL in current tab by opening the Goto dialog.
openURL(URL) Open the passed URL in current tab.
openURL(URL, new-tab) Opens the passed URL in new tab.
openURL(URL, new-window) Opens the passed URL in new window.
xfeDoCommand(openBrowser) Opens an ELinks instance in a new window. This ELinks
instance will connect to the already running one.
CAPTION: Table: ELinks extensions.
Command Description
addBookmark(URL) Bookmarks the passed URL.
infoBox(text) Show text in a message box.
-remote can also take a list of URLs without an explicit action, in which case
the URL arguments will be opened in new tabs in the remote instance. For example,
by running:
$ elinks -remote slashdot.org fm g:elinks
new tabs containing slashdot.org, freshmeat.net and a Google search of elinks
will be opened.
13. The tale of ex-mode
Are you a vim-controls nerd who wants to see them everywhere? Welcome.
Actually ELinks doesn't shine in this area yet very much. Heck, the famous hjkl
foursome is still occupied by some feeble managers in the default keymap (we have
that in our monumental TODO lists). Still, if you know what to touch during the
compilation (--enable-exmode), you can get at least some familiar reply to the
mighty ":" (colon) grip.
13.1. What it is
Ex-mode gives you some (still very rough and only marginally complete) access to
advanced ELinks commands, to be invoked anywhere anytime, straight and fast.
When you activate the ex-mode (named after the equivalent gadget in the vi text
editor flavours), a command line appears at the bottom of the screen for you to
type the commands.
Only two kinds of commands are supported so far. First, (almost?) anything that
can appear in the configuration file can be used in ex-mode. Second, you can
invoke (almost) any action from the ex-mode.
13.2. Configuration directives in exmode
There aren't many of these, so we can skim through them fast.
If you want to flip an option you know by name and refuse to engage with the
option manager visuals, you can just drop in to the ex-mode and type set
the.option = 1234. See man elinks.conf (5) or the options manager for the list of
options; you can also get a complete options tree saved to elinks.conf if you set
config.saving_style = 2 (but do NOT keep that setting unless you know what are
you doing; if we change a default value of some option in future releases, we
(generally) know what are we doing - this change won't propagate to you during an
upgrade if you already have the original default value saved in your
configuration file, though).
It's the same story with keybindings. You can use bind "main" "h" =
"move-cursor-left". It's not the same story with keybindings documentation. There
is the elinkskeys (5) manual page but it's horribly obsolete, so don't rely on
it. You can refer to the keybindings manager for names of actions and even their
short descriptions. Also, all the bind commands are saved to the configuration
file if you set config.saving_style = 2 (but see above).
You can also use include my.conf, which will read my.conf as an ELinks
configuration file.
Actually, ELinks would eat #blahblah blah too, if you see a point in feeding it
that kind of stuff.
13.3. Actions in exmode - or exmode in action?
There is too many of these, so we should better skim through them fast.
Actually, we already talked about them. It's the last argument to the bind
command. So, they are those listed in the keybinding manager. So if you enter
move-cursor-left command, it will move your cursor left - by a single character,
making this a little awkward, but it's useful if you sometimes want to easily
invoke an action and you don't want to waste a key for it.
Actually, actions could theoretically take arguments too. This is currently
implemented only for the goto-url action, which can take the location it should
go at as a parameter (otherwise it opens the standard well-known dialog as if you
pressed g in the default keymap).
Regarding the mysterious "(almost)" hinted above, you can never invoke the "quit"
action from the exmode - if you type it there, "really-quit" is invoked instead.
13.4. How to use it
It's simple. You press : (without the apostrophes, of course) and type in the
command, then you press enter. E.g., :set config.saving_style = 3 (this is a good
thing), :quit (and the game is over). The standard line-editing facility is
present (cursor keys and so), and the ex-mode input line has own history.
13.5. The "but"s
The biggest usability hurdle so far is that there is no tab-completion. This is
why the ex-mode support is not enabled by default and part of the reason why its
practical usage is somewhat limited yet - if you don't remember exactly what do
you want to invoke, tough beans. Someone shall address this issue in the future.
Also, perhaps wider scale of commands should be implemented in ex-mode. The code
is extremely flexible and it is very trivial to make another ex-mode command
handler, it's just that no one has done it yet ;-). Also, more actions should be
able to take arguments.
14. ELinks BitTorrent Client
This chapter provides a small manual for using the implemented BitTorrent client.
The BitTorrent client is provided as an optional add-on for ELinks, and needs to
be enabled at compile time. To build ELinks with BitTorrent support be sure to
either pass --enable-bittorrent to ./configure or change the value of
CONFIG_BITTORRENT to yes in features.conf.
14.1. Using the BitTorrent Client
To start the client, first go to a site which offers metainfo files. In the
following, we will use the site [29]http://www.legaltorrents.com/. Direct ELinks
to this site by issuing the command:
$ elinks http://www.legaltorrents.com/
Use the arrow keys to move between links on the page. Find a link, which points
to a metainfo file (a file having the extension .torrent). This is indicated in
the status bar in the bottom line. Once a metainfo file has been located, press
the Return key. This should present you with the following dialog, querying
whether the client should start to download the torrent:
+--------------------------- What to do? ----------------------------+
| |
| What would you like to do with the file 'go-open-vol-2.torrent'? |
| Information about the torrent: |
| Size: 739 MiB (2959 * 262144 + 161542) |
| Info hash: d85ef7b05288dc49203a7de97545e6c132834011 |
| Announce URI: http://www.legaltorrents.com:7070/announce |
| Creation date: Jun 26 08:04 |
| Directory: go-open-vol-2 |
| |
| [X] 105 MiB go-open-episode-07.mp4 |
| [X] 105 MiB go-open-episode-08.mp4 |
| [X] 105 MiB go-open-episode-09.mp4 |
| [X] 104 MiB go-open-episode-10.mp4 |
| [X] 105 MiB go-open-episode-11.mp4 |
| [X] 107 MiB go-open-episode-12.mp4 |
| [X] 106 MiB go-open-episode-13.mp4 |
| [X] 22 KiB go-open-vol-2.txt |
| |
| [ Download ] [ Save ] [ Display ] [ Show header ] [ Cancel ] |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
Press the [ Download ] button to open the download dialog and start downloading.
Downloaded files can be found in the directory specified by the option
document.download.directory. There is currently no way to change that.
14.2. The Resume Dialog
If you start downloading a torrent which was previously active, the client will
first try to resume downloaded data from the disk. The resume progress is shown
in the resume dialog, depicted below:
+--------------------------------------- Download ---------------------------------------+
| |
| bittorrent:http://www.legaltorrents.com/bit/blue-a-short-film.torrent |
| |
| [|||||||||||||||||||||||||| 26% ] |
| |
| Resuming |
| |
| [ Background ] [ Background with notify ] [ Info ] [ Abort ] [ Abort and delete file ] |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Wait until the resume completes. It will automatically launch the download
dialog.
14.3. The Download Dialog
The download dialog gives an overview of the state of the download, such as
progress, and a summary of which places in the torrent pieces have been
downloaded from. A view of the download dialog along with highlights of the most
important parts of the dialog is given below:
+--------------------------------------- Download ---------------------------------------+
| |
| bittorrent:http://www.legaltorrents.com/bit/best-of-webbed-hand-vol-1.torrent |
| |
| [||||||||| 9% ] |
| |
| [| ||||||||||||||||||| | | | ] |
| |
| Received 65 MiB of 681 MiB |
| Average speed 269 KiB/s, current speed 291 KiB/s |
| Elapsed time 4:08, estimated time 38:58 |
| |
| Status: downloading (rarest first) |
| Peers: 7 connections, 5 seeders, 0 available |
| Upload: 816 KiB, 3.2 KiB/s, 3.2 KiB/s average, 1:1 in 5:36:06 |
| Sharing: 0.012 (816 KiB uploaded / 65 MiB downloaded) |
| Pieces: 242 completed, 22 in progress, 2485 remaining |
| Statistics: 9 in memory |
| |
| [ Background ] [ Background with notify ] [ Info ] [ Abort ] [ Abort and delete file ] |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The first bar shows the overall progress of the download along with a percentage
of how much data has been downloaded. The second bar provides an overview of the
piece completion progress, such as where in the torrent pieces has been
downloaded from.
Below the information about download speed and time estimations, several lines
about the internal state of the client and its view of the swarm is displayed.
For example the Status line shows which connection mode the client has entered
along with the piece selection strategy if any. Here you will also find
information about upload speed and sharing rates. Finally, the Pieces and
Statistics lines display information from the piece cache. This includes the
number of pieces which are currently held in memory, and the number of pieces
currently being downloaded.
15. Scripting ELinks with Lua
This file documents the Lua scripting interface of the ELinks web browser.
15.1. Introduction
15.1.1. What is it
Lua scripting capabilities permit users to customize the ELinks behaviour to
unusual degree - they allow automatic rewriting of HTML code of the received
documents, rewriting of the URLs entered by user etc. You can even write your own
bookmarks system with Lua. See also contrib/lua/ for some examples of the
possibilities of ELinks Lua support.
Please do not confuse Lua scripting with JavaScript, EcmaScript, VBScript and
similar. Those are embedded in page, allowing per-document scripting related to
its presentation and providing some degree of interactivity etc. On the contrary,
the current Lua support permits scripts to be embedded to the browser directly,
changing the behaviour of the browser, not the document.
The original Lua support (in the form of Links-Lua fork of original Links) was
written by Peter Wang and Cliff Cunnington. There are some rough edges remaining,
but is suitable for everyday use (I have been using it every day for a year).
15.1.2. Where to get it
The Lua scripting support comes with the stock ELinks distribution, no additional
patches and tweaks should be needed.
The web site of the original Links-Lua is at
[30]http://links.sourceforge.net/links-lua/. Some older patches against regular
Links are available at [31]http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/links/, but they
are not being maintained.
Lua can be found at [32]http://www.lua.org/.
15.1.3. What it runs on
The Lua support has only been tested under Linux, although it should work under
other platforms that ELinks and Lua support (perhaps with some changes to source
code?).
Also, note that many of the scripts given here assume a Unix system. Your mileage
will definitely vary on other platforms.
15.2. Installing
15.2.1. Installing Lua
Before you can compile ELinks with Lua support, you must compile and install Lua.
The following instructions are for a Linux system. People on other systems should
try to enable popen support, but this is not necessary (you will lose a bit of
functionality though).
1. Download and unpack the Lua tar.gz or zip somewhere.
2. cd into the lua directory.
3. Open config in a text editor and uncomment the POPEN line.
4. Optionally, change the `INSTALL_ROOT line.
5. Run make; make so; make sobin; make install.
On systems without shared object support, simply run make; make install instead.
Since ELinks 0.11.0, only version 5.0 of Lua is supported. Future versions of
ELinks will probably support Lua 5.1 too; see [33]bug 742.
15.2.2. Installing ELinks
Follow the instructions for building ELinks (it is the standard ./configure;
make; make install procedure). During the configure step make sure that Lua has
been detected on your system.
15.2.3. Running ELinks with Lua
Simply start ELinks as you normally would. To check you have Lua support compiled
in, open up the "Help | About" dialog box. It should list "Scripting (Lua)" under
"Features". If not, make sure you do not have other copies of ELinks running, or
start ELinks again with the "-no-connect" option on the command-line.
15.3. Using ELinks with Lua
Out of the box, ELinks with Lua will do nothing different from regular ELinks.
You need to write some scripts.
15.3.1. ELinks Lua additions
The Lua support is based on the idea of hooks. A hook is a function that gets
called at a particular point during the execution of ELinks. To make ELinks do
what you want, you can add and edit such hooks.
The Lua support also adds an extra dialog box, which you can open while in ELinks
with the comma (,) key. Here you can enter Lua expressions for evaluation, or
override it to do something different.
And finally, you can bind keystrokes to Lua functions. These keystrokes won't let
you do any more than is possible with the Lua Console, but they're more
convenient.
Note that this document assumes you have some knowledge of programming in Lua.
For that, you should refer to the Lua reference manual
([34]http://www.lua.org/docs.html). In fact, the language is relatively trivial,
though. You could already do wonders with simply refactoring the example scripts.
15.3.2. Config file
On startup, ELinks reads in two Lua scripts. Firstly, a system-wide configuration
file called /etc/elinks/hooks.lua, then a file in your home directory called
~/.elinks/hooks.lua. From these files, you can include other Lua files with
dofile, if necessary.
To see what kind of things you should put in here, look at contrib/lua/hooks.lua.
15.3.3. Hooks
The following hooks are available.
goto_url_hook (url, current_url)
This hook is called when the user enters a string into the "Go to URL"
dialog box. It is given the string entered, and the current URL (which may
be nil). It should return a string, which is the URL that ELinks should
follow, or nil to cancel the operation.
follow_url_hook (url)
This hook is passed the URL that ELinks is about to follow. It should
return a string (the URL modified or unmodified), or nil to stop ELinks
following the URL
pre_format_html_hook (url, html)
This hook gets called just before the final time an HTML document is
formatted, i.e. it only gets called once, after the entire document is
downloaded. It will be passed the URL and HTML text as strings, and should
return the modified HTML text, or nil if there were no modifications.
proxy_for_hook (url)
This hook is called when ELinks is about to load a resource from a URL. It
should return "PROXY:PORT" (e.g. "localhost:8080") to use the specified
proxy, "" to contact the origin server directly, or nil to use the default
proxy of the protocol.
lua_console_hook (string)
This hook is passed the string that the user entered into the "Lua
Console" dialog box. It should return two values: the type of action to
take (run, eval, goto-url or nil), and a second argument, which is the
shell command to run or the Lua expression to evaluate. Examples:
+ return "run", "someprogram" will attempt to run the program someprogram.
+ return "eval", "somefunction(1+2)" will attempt to call the Lua function
somefunction with an argument, 3.
+ return "goto_url", "http://www.bogus.com" will ask ELinks to visit the
URL "http://www.bogus.com".
+ return nil will do nothing.
quit_hook ()
This hook is run just before ELinks quits. It is useful for cleaning up
things, such as temporary files you have created.
15.3.4. Functions
As well as providing hooks, ELinks provides some functions in addition to the
standard Lua functions.
Note
The standard Lua function os.setlocale affects ELinks' idea of the system locale,
which ELinks uses for the "System" charset, for the "System" language, and for
formatting dates. This may however have to be changed in a future version of
ELinks, in order to properly support terminal-specific system locales.
current_url ()
Returns the URL of the current page being shown (in the ELinks session
that invoked the function).
current_link ()
Returns the URL of the currently selected link, or nil if none is
selected.
current_title ()
Returns the title of the current page, or nil if none.
current_document ()
Returns the current document as a string, unformatted.
current_document_formatted ([width])
Returns the current document, formatted for the specified screen width. If
the width is not specified, then the document is formatted for the current
screen width (i.e. what you see on screen). Note that this function does
not guarantee all lines will be shorter than width, just as some lines may
be wider than the screen when viewing documents online.
pipe_read (command)
Executes command and reads in all the data from stdout, until there is no
more. This is a hack, because for some reason the standard Lua function
file:read seems to crash ELinks when used in pipe-reading mode.
execute (string)
Executes shell commands string without waiting for it to exit. Beware that
you must not read or write to stdin and stdout. And unlike the standard
Lua function os.execute, the return value is meaningless.
tmpname ()
Returns a unique name for a temporary file, or nil if no such name is
available. The returned string includes the directory name. Unlike the
standard Lua function os.tmpname, this one generates ELinks-related names
(currently with "elinks" at the beginning of the name).
Warning
The tmpname function does not create the file and does not guarantee exclusive
access to it: the caller must handle the possibility that another process creates
the file and begins using it while this function is returning. Failing to do this
may expose you to symlink attacks by other users. To avoid the risk, use
io.tmpfile instead; unfortunately, it does not tell you the name of the file.
bind_key (keymap, keystroke, function)
Currently, keymap must be the string "main". Keystroke is a keystroke as
you would write it in the ELinks config file ~/.elinks/elinks.conf. The
function function should take no arguments, and should return the same
values as lua_console_hook.
edit_bookmark_dialog (cat, name, url, function)
Displays a dialog for editing a bookmark, and returns without waiting for
the user to close the dialog. The return value is 1 if successful, nil if
arguments are invalid, or nothing at all if out of memory. The first three
arguments must be strings, and the user can then edit them in input
fields. There are also OK and Cancel buttons in the dialog. If the user
presses OK, ELinks calls function with the three edited strings as
arguments, and it should return similar values as in lua_console_hook.
xdialog (string [, more strings...], function)
Displays a generic dialog for editing multiple strings, and returns
without waiting for the user to close the dialog. The return value is 1 if
successful, nil if arguments are invalid, or nothing at all if out of
memory. All arguments except the last one must be strings, and ELinks
places them in input fields in the dialog. There can be at most 5 such
strings. There are also OK and Cancel buttons in the dialog. If the user
presses OK, ELinks calls function with the edited strings as arguments,
and it should return similar values as in lua_console_hook.
set_option (option, value)
Sets an ELinks option. The first argument option must be the name of the
option as a string. ELinks then tries to convert the second argument value
to match the type of the option. If successful, set_option returns value,
else nil.
get_option (option)
Returns the value of an ELinks option. The argument option must be the
name of the option as a string. If the option does not exist, get_option
returns nil.
15.3.5. Variables
elinks_home
The name of the ELinks home directory, as a string. Typically this is the
.elinks subdirectory of the user's home directory.
15.3.6. User protocol
There is one more little thing which Links-Lua adds, which will not be described
in detail here. It is the fake "user:" protocol, which can be used when writing
your own addons. It allows you to generate web pages containing links to
"user://blahblah", which can be intercepted by the follow_url_hook (among other
things) to perform unusual actions. For a concrete example, see the bookmark
addon.
15.4. Example recipes
This chapter contains some example scripts that you can use. All of them come
from contrib/lua/hooks.lua. I really recommend you to see it directly instead of
copying code out of this document. Also, not everything in there is covered here.
If you would like to contribute scripts, that would be great! Please send them to
me at [35]tjaden@users.sourceforge.net. Cliff and I plan to start a script
repository, provided we get some contributions. As for script ideas, you'll just
have to be a little creative :-)
Also take a look at the contrib/lua/ directory in the ELinks distribution. Note
that Peter and Cliff don't maintain the Lua support intensively anymore, thus it
would be probably nice to Cc me ([36]pasky@ucw.cz) if you want to contribute some
patch, so that I would be able to add it to the ELinks distribution.
15.4.1. Go to URL on steroids
There are some web sites that I visit often. Bookmarks are okay, but they are
separate from the "Go to URL" dialog box, so I keep forgetting to use them. Also,
when I visit a search engine home page, all I really want to do is enter a search
term.
The following script allows me to type certain strings into the "Go to URL"
dialog box, and it will convert them to the URL I actually want to visit. As a
bonus, it allows me perform some searches on sites like Google without loading up
the front page first.
Tip
The "URI rewriting" feature of ELinks handles many of the same tasks as the Lua
hook shown here, and you can conveniently configure it via the option manager. It
is not quite as versatile, though.
function match (prefix, url)
return string.sub (url, 1, string.len (prefix)) == prefix
end
function strip (str)
return string.gsub (str, "^%s*(.-)%s*$", "%1")
end
function plusify (str)
return string.gsub (str, "%s", "+")
end
function goto_url_hook (url, current_url)
-- Google search (e.g. ,gg unix browsers).
if match (",gg", url) then
url = plusify (strip (string.sub (url, 4)))
return "http://www.google.com/search?q="..url.".&btnG=Google+Search"
-- Freshmeat search.
elseif match (",fm", url) then
url = plusify (strip (string.sub (url, 4)))
return "http://www.freshmeat.net/search/?q="..url
-- Dictionary.com search (e.g. ,dict congenial).
elseif match (",dict", url) then
url = plusify (strip (string.sub (url, 6)))
return "http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?db=%2A&term="..url
-- RPM search (e.g. ,rpm links).
elseif match (",rpm", url) then
url = plusify (strip (string.sub (url, 5)))
return "http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query="
..url.".&submit=Search+..".
-- Netcraft.com search (e.g. ,whatis www.google.com).
elseif match (",whatis", url) then
url = plusify (strip (string.sub (url, 8)))
return "http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host="..url
-- LinuxToday home page.
elseif match (",lt", url) then
return "http://linuxtoday.com/"
-- Weather forecast for Melbourne, Australia.
elseif match (",forecast", url) then
return "http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/wrap_fwo.pl?IDV10450.txt"
-- Unmatched
else
return url
end
end
15.4.2. Expanding ~ (tilde)
By adding an extra snippet of code to the previous example, we can make ELinks
expand pathnames such as ~/foo/bar and ~user/zappo, like in the shell and other
Unix programs.
function goto_url_hook (url, current_url)
.
.
-- Expand ~ to home directories.
elseif match ("~", url) then
if string.sub(url, 2, 2) == "/" then -- ~/foo
return os.getenv ("HOME")..string.sub(url, 2)
else -- ~foo/bar
return "/home/"..string.sub(url, 2)
end
.
.
15.4.3. Filtering crap
Many web pages nowadays have columns to the left and right of the text, which are
utterly useless. If you happen to be viewing the page in a 80x25 screen, the text
you want to read ends up crammed into a tiny space in the centre. We use ELinks
Lua support to manipulate the HTML before it reaches the parser.
linuxtoday.com
Note
This recipe is out of date for the web site.
Linux Today has two problems when viewed in ELinks: the useless columns on the
left and the right and all the text appears in cyan. Here is a quick recipe to
fix that:
-- Plain string.find (no metacharacters)
function sstrfind (s, pattern)
return string.find (s, pattern, 1, true)
end
function pre_format_html_hook (url, html)
-- Strip the left and right columns from Linux Today pages
-- and change the font colour to white.
if sstrfind (url, "linuxtoday.com") then
if sstrfind (url, "news_story") then
html = string.gsub (html, '
Usage: http://www.kk-software.de/kklynxview/get/URL
e.g. http://www.kk-software.de/kklynxview/get/http://www.kk-software.de
Errormessages are in German, sorry ;-)