W3m

See also: Web browsers

Acronym: WWW-wo-Miru (Japanese – see below)

Home Page: http://w3m.sourceforge.net (Sourceforge)

A multi-platform, text-based web browser. Supports colors, frames, tabs, SSL, cookies, bookmarks, mouse navigation, external url loaders, ipv6 and gopher, multiple downloads, inline images (using X11 or linux framebuffer) … It is good for rendering complex pages in a terminal. There are also two patches which aren’t in CVS or the main branch at this point, but I found them very useful: async connections to allow you to load several pages at once and limited javascript support. The version distributed with gentoo supports everything mentioned about except javascript.

The name is Japanese for “See the WWW”. So in English, the name of this browser would be something like “stw3”.

w3m can also be used as a pager (like less or more), a HTML -> plain text converter, and can be significantly extended by using CGI scripts, which can be used directly from the hard drive.

Source and patches can be downloaded at http://www2u.biglobe.ne.jp/~hsaka/w3m/patch/, the only way I found to get the async patch to work (it’s 10000+ lines) was to get the patched gentoo .tbz, which should work on all unix-like systems.

Also if your display looks weird when using w3m set the default charset to ISO-8859-1


TakeDown.NET -> “W3m