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I've always been fascinated by the idea of text-mode browsers, but for most of it the experience was more and more aggravating, and never practical. To the poin

I've always been fascinated by the idea of text-mode browsers, but for most of it the experience was more and more aggravating, and never practical. To the point where console-based browsers like w3m started to strive to work more like graphical browsers... But I opened that page in eww (the browser mode in Emacs) and it just ran perfectly. Up until just the other day, modern web pages were serving a decent text-mode fallout, but they were placing sidebar content before the main content, so it came up on top. This in spite of the fact that they could very easily have put it afterwards -- CSS is handling everything, no? For an "evolution of the internet", it's great how gracefully this page degrades.

dredmorbius 8y ago
NYTimes have recently moved their asides and nav below main content, in the paagestream. I'm increasingly using text browsers. HN would benefit by a true nested (list) layout. Or a few <br /> tags within its table layout. And visible voting buttons. TFA here actually reads better as source than as rendered, on mobile (Chrome / Firefox).
- thanatropism 8y ago
  I have a bash alias "ddg" that opens duckduckgo on w3m for searching error messages and such. Despite "responsiveness" and all that, the best way to use a graphical web browser is full-screen; with a tiling wm, text browsers are often the best choice. I pity the fool that switches between jupyter notebooks and stack overflow answers using a mouse and tiny tiny tabs. That fool was me ~18 months ago.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    Bash function, but yeah. One of several. See also, surfraw. And newsboat / rsstail / multitail. ddg () { w3m https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q="$*"; } I've spent rather too much time recently coming up with a sane RSS output sanitizer / text formatter. Given the crap that's generated it's a complicated process.
  - c22 8y ago
    I use a whole separate computer for browsing/documentation. I switch my keyboard and mouse with a hotkey through my kvm, but I use multiple monitors to keep both systems visible at all times. The only downside of this setup is it forces me to reimplement stack overflow answers rather than copy and paste, but I suspect this is actually a good thing.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      Synergy should allow clipboard sharing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_(software)

dredmorbius 8y ago

NYTimes have recently moved their asides and nav below main content, in the paagestream. I'm increasingly using text browsers. HN would benefit by a true nested (list) layout. Or a few <br /> tags within its table layout. And visible voting buttons. TFA here actually reads better as source than as rendered, on mobile (Chrome / Firefox).

thanatropism 8y ago
I have a bash alias "ddg" that opens duckduckgo on w3m for searching error messages and such. Despite "responsiveness" and all that, the best way to use a graphical web browser is full-screen; with a tiling wm, text browsers are often the best choice. I pity the fool that switches between jupyter notebooks and stack overflow answers using a mouse and tiny tiny tabs. That fool was me ~18 months ago.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Bash function, but yeah. One of several. See also, surfraw. And newsboat / rsstail / multitail. ddg () { w3m https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q="$*"; } I've spent rather too much time recently coming up with a sane RSS output sanitizer / text formatter. Given the crap that's generated it's a complicated process.
- c22 8y ago
  I use a whole separate computer for browsing/documentation. I switch my keyboard and mouse with a hotkey through my kvm, but I use multiple monitors to keep both systems visible at all times. The only downside of this setup is it forces me to reimplement stack overflow answers rather than copy and paste, but I suspect this is actually a good thing.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    Synergy should allow clipboard sharing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_(software)