Site dedicated to the finer aspects of W3M, an open-source terminal web browser (and pager) available for any Unix-like OS.
While traditionally considered a 'backup' recourse for browsing simple pages in a non-graphical environment, I use it as a primary browser on all workstations (Linux laptops and Android Tablets inside Termux).
A handful of key features
- All HTML entities rendered via ASCII and Unicode
- No JavaScript
- No CSS; just basic HTML 4.0 rendering, including tables
- No images (without terminal hacks). Images viewable externally via keystroke.
- Uniform, basic 8-color palette.
- Supports buffers and tabs for switching between loaded pages.
- Interact entirely via customizable keystrokes or even macros (also has mouse support)
- Integrate seamlessly with your terminal editor (ie VIM/Emacs)
- Navigation/scrolling/searching nearly instantaneous across loaded content. No visual delay inherent to graphical browsers.
- Place and easily navigate across marks within a page
- Handy as an E-Reader
Merits
View content without modern web bloat
- No pop-up ads (no JavaScript to render them)
- No distracting images (without hacks in certain terminals)
- Emulate the traditional, minimalist web.
- Reclaim emotional energy and time.
- Emphasize the actual, pertinent web content
Conserve eyesight
- No overwhelming styles or colors (or ads or flashy pop-ups)
- One configurable color scheme for all pages (ie light text on a dark background), without external plugins or site customizations
Extremely lightweight
- No CPU or GPU stress for graphical rendering or JavaScript calls
- Tiny memory footprint dedicated predominantly to text.
- Lighter network traffic. Again, only text content to deal with.
Prevails over any graphical browser in performance.
- Cycle between loaded pages instantaneously. No split-moment (or longer) delay to refresh graphical frame-buffers.
- Performance merits on both ancient and modern hardware. (I've used on Android tablets (within Termux), Arch Linux and Debian laptops, the $5 Raspberry PI Zero and VPSs)
Where to start
See the howto page.
For further reference,