#[1]ELinks RSS

   [2]ELinks : [3]About | [4]Community | [5]Documentation | [6]Download | [7]FAQ |
   [8]Feedback | [9]News | [10]Search

                                          About

   ELinks is a program for browsing the web in text mode. The goal of the project
   has from the beginning been to provide a feature-rich text mode browser with an
   open patches/features inclusion policy and active development. One of these
   features is that ELinks includes [11]Links-Lua which adds scripting capabilities
   to ELinks.

   ELinks was forked from the original Links browser written by [12]Mikulas Patocka.
   It is in no way associated with [13]Twibright Labs and their Links version.
   Please read to [14]the history page for more information about the various Links
   versions and forks.

   Over the years many people have [15]contributed to making ELinks what it is
   today.

Features

   Below the most noteworthy features are listed.
     * Lots of protocols (local files, finger, http, https, ftp, smb, ipv4, ipv6)
     * Authentication (HTTP authentication, Proxy authentication)
     * Persistent cookies
     * Cute menus and dialogs ([16]screenshot available)
     * Tabbed browsing
     * Support for browser scripting (Perl, Lua, Guile)
     * Tables and frames rendering ([17]screenshot available)
     * Colors ([18]screenshot available)
     * Background (non-blocking) downloads ([19]screenshot available)

   [20]More about features and future goals ...

Supported platforms

   ELinks is written in near-ANSI C and is quite portable. It has been reported to
   run at least on the following platforms:
   Platform Tested version More information
   AIX ? ?
   BeOS ? ?
   [21]CygWin ELinks 0.9.0-2 [22]ITP post to cygwin-apps.
   Digital Unix ? ?
   [23]FreeBSD ELinks 0.11.2 [24]FreeBSD Ports. May crash with [25]bug 919; fixed in
   ELinks 0.11.3.
   [26]GNU Hurd ELinks 0.13.GIT 2007-12-13 [27]select() spuriously indicates an
   exception in a pipe, making ELinks stop reading from the terminal; [28]patch
   ELinks to work around that. [29]There is no /dev/random, so configure without
   GnuTLS or set up another entropy source. [30]Bug 1013 may hinder error handling.
   HPUX ELinks 0.4pre3 [31]Link error.
   IRIX ELinks 0.9.3 [32]Problems upgrading to 0.10.
   [33]Linux alpha ELinks 0.11.3 [34]Worked without problems.
   [35]Linux x86 ELinks 0.11.4rc1 [36]Bug 1011 in Bash 2.05a and later.
   [37]Mac OS X ELinks 0.11.5 [38]Darwin Ports.
   Microsoft Windows ? ?
   [39]NetBSD ELinks 0.11.3 [40]The NetBSD Packages Collection: www/elinks.
   [41]OpenBSD ELinks 0.11.5 [42]Included in OpenBSD 4.5.
   OS/2 ELinks 0.4pre6 [43]Binary packages at OS/2 Site.
   RISC OS ELinks 0.4.2.99-1 It seems the [44]Unix Porting Project has dropped
   ELinks.
   [45]Solaris ELinks 0.11.3 "SunOS 5.8 Generic_117350-46 sun4u sparc
   SUNW,Sun-Fire-480R": Use GNU Make 0.78 or later. Apply the patch from [46]bug
   950. Ignore "gcc: unrecognized option `-rdynamic'".

   Current versions of ELinks do several things that ANSI C does not really allow:
     * [47]Bug 189: aliasing between pointers of different types.
     * Declaring e.g. unsigned char name[1] as the last member of a structure,
       allocating extra memory with malloc, and then using more elements than
       declared. (Some system might detect this as a buffer overflow.)
     * Changing the size of a buffer with realloc and then comparing pointers to see
       whether it moved.
     * Casting integers to void * and back to integers. (Some system might raise an
       exception when such a pointer is loaded to an address register, or lose bits
       of the integer value.) One of these casts is required by
       gnutls_transport_set_ptr.
     * Calling functions via function pointers that have different types of
       parameters. Typically, the function takes a pointer to a struct, but the
       function pointer takes a void *. (Some system might use different
       representations for pointers of different types, or pass them in different
       registers.)
     * [48]Bug 1012: multiplying signed integers and then checking whether the
       result wrapped around. (Some system might detect the overflow and abort the
       process. According to the C standard, unsigned integers must silently wrap
       around, but signed integers might not.)
     * Forward-declaring enum types and then passing pointers to them as parameters.
       (This is a [49]GCC extension. The representation of such pointers could in
       principle depend on the set of values defined for the enum, especially if
       sizeof(char *) != sizeof(int *).)

Why text mode ?

   It may seem strange that anyone would develop a text mode browser in a world
   where the power of computers keep improving and most people favor graphical
   applications. Most graphical browsers are slow (especially to start up) and eat a
   lot of memory. For some people, this is unacceptable, so avoiding these browsers
   to harvest your critical system resources when doing basic tasks on the net is
   one thing. Text browsers are also invaluable on servers without a graphical
   environment and over SSH (or similiar) text-only sessions. Besides, text mode
   browsing is fun and highly addictive when you get the hang of it. ;-)

   And if you think that the current web is unbrowsable without images, you are
   wrong. 75% of the actual sites you visit are perfectly browsable (especially with
   the tables support) and another 15% are not exactly pleasant but still
   well-viewable. And even in text browser you can easily view individual images
   through some external viewer (like zgv on Linux console). Some people are
   actually using ELinks as their exclusive browser. However, you obviously do not
   need to be so extreme to still have many good practical uses for a text browser.

Other ways of browsing the web in text mode

   ELinks is not the only text browser around. There are the various other [50]Links
   flavors. You might be also familiar with [51]lynx, one of the oldest text
   browsers, available on many systems. You will find that a lot of the navigation
   keys in ELinks are similar to lynx'. There also is [52]w3m, which has some very
   interesting features, such as inline images or novel control style.
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   See the [53]feedback page for information on contacting us. Copyright © 2002-2008
   [54]ELinks; Licensed under [55]GPL.

   Last Modified: 13-Jun-2009 12:23:58 EEST. Validate: [56]CSS [57]XHTML.

References

   1. http://elinks.or.cz/news.rss
   2. http://elinks.or.cz/index.html
   3. http://elinks.or.cz/about.html
   4. http://elinks.or.cz/community.html
   5. http://elinks.or.cz/documentation/index.html
   6. http://elinks.or.cz/download.html
   7. http://elinks.or.cz/faq.html
   8. http://elinks.or.cz/feedback.html
   9. http://elinks.or.cz/news.html
  10. http://elinks.or.cz/search.html
  11. http://elinks.or.cz/history.html#links-lua
  12. mailto:mikulas@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz
  13. http://www.twibright.com/
  14. http://elinks.or.cz/history.html
  15. http://elinks.or.cz/credits.html
  16. http://elinks.or.cz/screenshots/#UI
  17. http://elinks.or.cz/screenshots/#frames-and-tables
  18. http://elinks.or.cz/screenshots/#colors
  19. http://elinks.or.cz/screenshots/#multiple-downloads
  20. http://elinks.or.cz/features.html
  21. http://www.cygwin.com/
  22. http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2003-12/msg00323.html
  23. http://www.freebsd.org/
  24. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/www/elinks/
  25. http://bugzilla.elinks.cz/show_bug.cgi?id=919
  26. http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
  27. http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?22861
  28. http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/elinks-dev/2007-December/001683.html
  29. http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?5130
  30. http://bugzilla.elinks.cz/show_bug.cgi?id=1013
  31. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/links-list/2002-March/001942.html
  32. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/elinks-users/2005-February/000828.html
  33. http://www.linux.org/
  34. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=262514#42
  35. http://www.linux.org/
  36. http://bugzilla.elinks.cz/show_bug.cgi?id=1011
  37. http://www.apple.com/macosx
  38. http://elinks.darwinports.com/
  39. http://www.netbsd.org/
  40. ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/www/elinks/README.html
  41. http://www.openbsd.org/
  42. http://www.openbsd.org/4.5_packages/
  43. http://www.os2site.com/sw/internet/browser/links/index.html
  44. http://www.riscos.info/packages/SectionIndex.html#Browser
  45. http://www.sun.com/solaris
  46. http://bugzilla.elinks.cz/show_bug.cgi?id=950
  47. http://bugzilla.elinks.cz/show_bug.cgi?id=189
  48. http://bugzilla.elinks.cz/show_bug.cgi?id=1012
  49. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.3.0/gcc/Incomplete-Enums.html
  50. http://elinks.or.cz/history.html
  51. http://lynx.isc.org/
  52. http://w3m.sf.net/
  53. http://elinks.or.cz/feedback.html#web
  54. http://elinks.cz/
  55. http://elinks.or.cz/COPYING
  56. http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer
  57. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer