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Comment by sourcecodeplz | Hacker News Reader

I've heard there's quite the group here on HN that browse the web on CLI browsers.

It's not something that's remotely practical on most modern sites. I hate everything new as well, but at some point it's easier to just suck it up and face the hell that is the modern internet.

The thing is w3m really filter yourself out of the shitty web. Most interesting websites are quite readable on w3m. The ones that aren't are usually the worst ones or thoses that provide an api for which better gui and tui clients exist.

When I'm on lynx I find I don't miss the rest of the Web. Reading documents without people constantly trying to sell me crap is kind of refreshing.

I agree with what you're saying but firefox with ublock origin and reader mode is definitely useful

Is there a good way to automatically *always* have reader mode on?

Better yet, are there any ways to *not even load the other junk*, just load the text only for the reader mode.

As far as I understand, Firefox still loads everything, does the parsing for everything, loads all those ads etc (and no, uBO does not get all of them), and then - *if you click the reader button in the URL box* - it will switch to reader mode. Seems quite backwards to the point of not really a workable solution for the automation junkie programmers of HN.

Would be nice to have a solution with better defaults to give reader mode automatically, default use uMatrix (much better than noscript btw) for control native to the browser, etc for a more snappy and controllable (with paths to private and secure) browsing experience. Having a tui would be icing on the cake.

Lynx just works though, and sidesteps all the js junk.

> Better yet, are there any ways to not even load the other junk, just load the text only for the reader mode.

You can use uMatrix to default block all stylesheets and JS. Then apply your own user stylesheet.

> I hate everything new as well

It's not about hating new things. It's about things making tradeoffs that don't make sense to some.

Been a while, but I had a better time with w3m. I think it was the only textmode browser I tried that preserved the nesting of comments on HN.

Context: I was on a 3kbps connection and basically everything was unusable, so I ran a textmode browser on a VPS over Mosh.

I did that, literally the same, but with lynx/links instead of w3m over a pubnix with mosh.

Also, gopher sites thru gopher://hngopher.com and gopher://magical.fish.

I could even play some streaming radio with OPUS @16KBPS from http://dir.xiph.org once I set mplayer to cache the 90% of the stream.

Yeah, I set up my own Opus mirror of Chilledcow's Lofi station ;) Necessity is the mother of reading manpages!

I used to use a CLI client for Reddit primarily. It was great. Maybe I should check that out again...something about the CLI really appeals to me.

You have ttrv and lynx gopher://gopherddit.com.

I use w3m as often as I can. I already pretty much live in the command line, and text-heavy sites like HN or some sort of documentation look just fine (or, IMO, even better) via w3m. Not always, but often. It's a very nice option to have.

This is the second comment here claiming that w3m displays HN correctly - what am I doing wrong? Most comments are not correctly indented.

Is there a @media query type thing for TTY devices?

Some way to tell the server to render text-only, gopher, or gemtext (from gemini protocol)?

I used Lynx every now and then, back in the mid-90's. Eventually it is time to move on.

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