text based web browser download Introduction. Browsh is a purely text-based browser that can run in most TTY terminal environments and in any browser. The terminal client is currently more advanced than the browser client. TTY client. The terminal client updates and renders in realtime so that, for instance, you can watch videos. It uses the UTF-8 half-block trick (▄) to get 2 colours from every character cell, thus simulating basic graphics. As well as keyboard input it also understands mouse input, for those terminals that support it. So you can click links and even draw lines in sketch apps. Browser client. The browser client, somewhat confusingly, renders simple HTML or plain text that itself was parsed by Browsh running inside another browser. The point being that the HTML or text that Browsh outputs is extremely lightweight. As of writing in 2018, the average website requires downloading around 3MB and making over 100 individual HTTP requests. Browsh will turn this into around 15kb and 2 HTTP requests - 1 for the HTML/text and the other for the favicon. Currently the HTML/text output is not updated in real time nor interactive, the hope is that the browser client will eventually have feature parity with the TTY client. Installation. Design. Browsh consists of a minimal Golang CLI client and a browser webextension. Most of the work is done by the webextension. When the CLI starts, it looks for a compatible browser (currently only Firefox) and starts it in headless mode. Once the browser has started it opens a remote debugging connection and installs the extension. When a web page loads in the browser, custom scripts are injected into the page which then connect to Browsh’s background process in the webextension. This background process is itself connected to the CLI client via a websocket. The per-page content scripts also apply some custom CSS to attempt to make the page conform as closely as possible to a rigid grid as is enforced by terminal cells. This is not always successful as web pages often carefully position elements to pixel values that aren’t units of a character cell – so compromises sometimes need to be made when 2 characters want to occupy the same cell. To save having to parse every single character’s colour and visibility, Browsh uses a custom uni-glyph fullblock font, where every character is: █. Parsing the computed styles for an element is computationally expensive. So instead, to get the colour of a character, the frame builder inspects the pixel value of the page’s screenshot that corresponds to the charcter’s position. This also has the added benefit of being able to detect a character’s visibility without parsing CSS – if the pixel value changes colour when showing and hiding text, then the character is visible. There are of course edge cases, but their infrequency means that dealing with them is still cheaper than CSS parsing. In the case of the TTY client the graphics for a frame are generated during the original page’s state of hidden text. This screenshot is then scaled to the same size as the active terminal. Those pixel values are then converted to terminal colour escape codes. Finally the text is layered over the graphics and rendered to the terminal. vimb - the vim like browser. Vimb is a fast and lightweight vim like web browser based on the webkit web browser engine and the GTK toolkit. Vimb is modal like the great vim editor and also easily configurable during runtime. Vimb is mostly keyboard driven and does not distract you from your daily work. If your are familiar with vim or have some experience with pentadactyl the use of vimb would be a breeze, if not we missed our target. latest features. Vimb 3.6.0 released New option --cmd, -C Allow to give ex commands on startup that are give to new spawned child instances too. New setting dark-mode These new settings enabled dark mode in the webview. More about latest changes can be found in the CHANGELOG.md. screenshots. There isn’t really much to see for a browser that is controlled via keyboard. But following images may give a impression of they way vimb works. features. it’s modal like Vim Vim like keybindings - assignable for each browser mode nearly every configuration can be changed at runtime with Vim like set syntax history for ex commands, search queries, URLs completions for: commands, URLs, bookmarked URLs, variable names of settings, search-queries hinting - marks links, form fields and other clickable elements to be clicked, opened or inspected SSL validation against ca- certificate file user defined URL-shortcuts with placeholders read it later queue to collect URIs for later use multiple yank/paste registers Vim like autocmd - execute commands automatically after an event on specific URIs. packages. Arch Linux: community/vimb, aur/vimb-git, aur/vimb-gtk2 Gentoo: gentoo-git, gentoo openSUSE: network/vimb pkgsrc: pkgsrc/www/vimb, pkgsrc/wip/vimb-git Slackware: slackbuild/vimb. download. You can get vimb from github by following command. dependencies. webkit2gtk-4.0 >= 2.8.x. install. Edit config.mk to match your local setup. You might need to do this if you use another compiler, like tcc. Most people, however, will almost never need to do this on systems like Ubuntu or Debian. Edit src/config.h to match your personal preferences, like changing the characters used in the loading bar, or the font. The default Makefile will not overwrite your customised config.h with the contents of config.def.h , even if it was updated in the latest git pull. Therefore, you should always compare your customised config.h with config.def.h and make sure you include any changes to the latter in your config.h . Run the following commands to compile and install Vimb (if necessary, the last one as root). V=1 enables verbose output for those that are interested to see full compiler option lines. If you wish to install with other PREFIX note that this option must be given for both steps the compile step as well as the install step. To run vimb without installation for testing it out use the ‘runsandbox’ make target. contribute. If you find a misbehaviour or have feature requests use the issue tracker provided by github or via mailing list (list archive). Installation. Browsh’s prerequisites are a current (57+) version of Firefox and a terminal client that supports true colour. Once you have those you can download the appropriate binary or package for your system. Note that the following examples all use x64 packages. Please use the proper package for your architecture. Debian/Ubuntu. Redhat/Fedora. Packages such as the .deb and .rpm versions provide a new browsh command. So too does the Homebrew command (for OSX users only). Static Binary. The static binaries need to first be made executable; chmod a+x browsh_1.6.4_linux_amd64 . You will then be able to run the Browsh TTY client with: ./browsh_1.6.4_linux_amd64 . Docker. A Docker image is available that bundles an up to date version of Firefox, so that everything you need to run Browsh is self-contained. You can pull and run the TTY client with: docker run -it --rm browsh/browsh. 12 Best Text Only Browsers for browsing in slow internet connections. Text Only Browsers: – Did you ever find yourself in a situation when you are browsing something important or saving some data and the slow internet speed kills it all? Well, we all go through such situations every now and then, and we are left midway wondering what to do next! At this point, what we need is a Text Only Browser that can help us browse only in text mode minus the graphics. The interfaces of these browsers are extremely simple in layout and function quite speedily. The fact that “text only browsers” require less bandwidth to operate, they load pages much faster than the graphic based web browsers. Besides, the graphic web browsers also consume greater CPU resources for Javascript, CSS, etc. Also, apart from the speed and the data saving fact, Text Only Browsers are also beneficial for the visually impaired or those who suffer from partial blindness as these are accompanied with text-to- speech application that reads the content aloud to them. When you open some of the text based browsers you will find options to browse through different websites, and for some you will need to use shortcut keys to navigate. But wait, the benefits of these browsers don’t stop here as these browsers are occasionally used by programmers as well. Experience uncomplicated browsing and reading without the graphics, identify the viewing habits of web crawlers and track the ease of your web pages using Text Only Browsers. So, let’s take you to the world of some of the best Text Only Browsers that are free and some are even open source. Lynx easily leads the text based browser category as it is the oldest text based browser and highly susceptible to configuration. It is a complete browser and not an extension as you must have thought. What’s good here is that even though it is the forbearer of the Text Only Browser category it works with most of the operating systems like Windows, Unix, etc. and even with their latest versions. The text interface of Lynx resembles more of a command line that makes it extremely easy to navigate. When you run this text-only-browser it takes you directly to their homepage. Press the “G” key, input the desired website URL and hit the “Enter” button to open up a new website.