ANSi Web Browser concept (2012) | Hacker News Reader

ANSi Web Browser concept (2012)

cambus.net

30 pointsmarttt25 comments

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See also: Lynx [1], w3m [2], Links [3]/Links2 [4], ELinks [5]/FELinks [6], Browsh [7]...

[1] http://lynx.browser.org/

[2] http://w3m.sourceforge.net/

[3] http://www.jikos.cz/~mikulas/links/

[4] http://links.twibright.com/

[5] http://elinks.or.cz/

[6] https://github.com/rkd77/elinks

[7] https://www.brow.sh/

What are the significant features of FELinks as compared to other Links-es?

FELinks is a fork of ELinks, the primary difference being that it's maintained. Notably, Debian uses the FELinks source to build the elinks package.

(What the difference between ELinks and Links/Links2 is, I forget.)

Apparently there's an overview of the differences and evolution on the Elinks page: http://elinks.cz/history.html

Now you need to handle YouTube without the video - audio only. If it has small footprint and doesn't suffer from Mozilla's horrendous memory leaks, I would use it. Good work!

+1, this has been my preferred use of Youtube for several years, via youtube-dl [1]. At least when it comes to talks and lectures, the relevant part IMO mostly lies in the audio; visuals are rarely of essential importance.

An audio-only minimalist youtube.com front-end (with video thumbnails entirely disabled) would be nice to have.

1: to extract only audio: youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=somevideo

ditto

I kinda wish there was an alternative hypertext to html focused on terminal rendering.

I would love to be able to write cui the same way i wrote web pages. right now the best solution seem to use a text-based web browser, but the are kinda limited, (i didn't find a good way to render menus for example) This seem closer to what i want

Some favour of markdown maybe?

Yes, but it should support also support more interactive/complex elements like forms and menus and (maybe) some scripting.

I want to be able to create relative complex interfaces, without resorting to explicitly coding them (like i'm doing now).

There is a browser for the terminal:

https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh

I love it!

Yea, who cares about Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Thai. F those languages!

> text mode is the undisputed best way to display information on a computer screen

Yea, those ANSI text based maps are so readable.

Terminals that can render UTF-8 have been a thing for a while; my goofy shell prompt can attest to this.

If you want to surf the multilingual web in your terminal, screenshots seem to indicate that Links (a venerable text-mode web browser) renders Unicode text just fine: http://links.twibright.com/features.php

>Yea, who cares about Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Thai. F those languages!

Despite your snarkiness, this is a perfectly valid point. If i'm not gonna use certain features in a piece of software, that feature may as well not be there. There are enough alternatives so that people that do need to use these languages are well served. But if that's not my case, there's no point in making my stuff compatible with it since it's not of any use to me

It's actually not. Text mode doesn't mean you have to use an 8-bit code like Code Page 437. You could just as well use Unicode. It really just makes GP sound like they're looking for an excuse to be snarky and they just come off sounding ignorant.

> Yea, who cares about Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Thai. F those languages!

do you think the necessary scripts for those languages was only displayable once GUI web browsers were developed?

they're all delivered to browsers today as text (unicode certainly covers all of them simultaneously, an improvement on their situation in the 90s). i believe there are sufficient fonts to display them in text mode (gnu unifont would do at least a half-assed job of it, all in one font).

what do you think is missing?

Turn off antialiasing for it, render it at the original size, and GNU Unifont is beautiful.

Thanks for this. I quite like how Russian characters look in GNU Unifont: https://web.archive.org/web/20180321021749/http://czyborra.c...

For my own needs, I prefer IBM VGA 8x16 from The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

Might try GNU Unifont now, though.

GNU Unifont at size 32 on 1920x1080 it's great.

I just tested the Wikipedia home page in five different text-mode browsers. All the scripts you listed appear just fine. (Granted, none of them display comically large headings using ANSI block-pixel art like the mockup in the article, but multilingual bitmap fonts exist.)

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