ELinks

ELinks is an advanced and well-established feature-rich text mode web (HTTP/FTP/..) browser. ELinks can render both frames and tables, is highly customizable and can be extended via Lua or Guile scripts. It is quite portable and runs on a variety of platforms. Check the about page for a more complete description.

Features

[c] 

means the feature is configurable at build time.

[d] 

means the feature depends on help from an external library or program. Some of the dependencies are listed on the installation page.

[e] 

means the feature is experimental and might not be complete or released.

Protocols and standards

• HTML3 (but will eat most HTML tag soup and also a lot of HTML4 stuff)
• Local file support
• HTTP authentication
• Proxy authentication
• JavaScript / ECMAScript [e] [c] [d]
• SSL (https) using either OpenSSL or GNU TLS [c] [d]
• Cascading Style Sheets [e] [c]
• FTP support (passive and active mode)
• Finger support [c]
• IPv6 support [c]
• Local CGI support [c]
• SMB support (requires smbclient) [c] [d]
• Persistent cookies support [c]
• Mimetypes file support for mapping file extensions to content types [c]
• Mailcap support for mapping content types to external handlers [c]
• Internationalized domain names [c] [d]

User interface

• Cute menus and dialogs
• Tabbed browsing
• Translated to many languages [c]
• Full-featured history browsing [c]
• Keybinding manager to easily change bindings or add new ones
• Forms history [c]
• Completion and history in commonly used input dialogs
• Typeahead searches
• Command line mode [e]

Configuration and extensions

• Highly configurable through menus and/or human readable text files
• Support for browser scripting (Lua, Guile, Perl) [c] [d]
• Hiearchic bookmarks
• XBEL bookmarks format support [c] [d]

Rendering

• Tables and frames rendering
• Support for monochrome, 16 (ANSI) colors and 256 colors ([c]) terminals
• Full color support - both foreground and background according to user configuration and/or as specified in the document

Downloading

• Background (non-blocking) downloads
• Download resuming support
• Compressed downloads support [c] [d]

Future goals

The current main goals of ELinks are:

• HTML engine rewrite; DOM support
• Graphics mode support
• Disk cache (maybe :)

For the other (mostly minor) planned features check the enhancement bugs filed against Bugzilla.

Examples

• Percent of USA population murdered by year (source: FBI):

elinks -dump http://bit.ly/qutWZK%7Csed -n -e 's/,//g' -e '/^1960/,/^2010/p'|awk '{p=$6/$2*100; print $1 " " p}'

See also

• Lynx
• cURL
• wget

External links

• Official website