About

Below the most noteworthy features are listed.

• Lots of protocols (local files, finger, http, https, ftp, smb, ipv4, ipv6)
• Authentication (HTTP authentication, Proxy authentication)
• Persistent cookies
• Cute menus and dialogs (screenshot available)
• Tabbed browsing
• Support for browser scripting (Perl, Lua, Guile)
• Tables and frames rendering (screenshot available)
• Colors (screenshot available)
• Background (non-blocking) downloads (screenshot available)

More about features and future goals …

ELinks is written in near-ANSI C and is quite portable. It has been reported to run at least on the following platforms:

Current versions of ELinks do several things that ANSI C does not really allow:

• Bug 189: aliasing between pointers of different types.
• Declaring e.g. unsigned char name[1] as the last member of a structure, allocating extra memory with malloc, and then using more elements than declared. (Some system might detect this as a buffer overflow.)
• Changing the size of a buffer with realloc and then comparing pointers to see whether it moved.
• Casting integers to void * and back to integers. (Some system might raise an exception when such a pointer is loaded to an address register, or lose bits of the integer value.) One of these casts is required by gnutls_transport_set_ptr.
• Calling functions via function pointers that have different types of parameters. Typically, the function takes a pointer to a struct, but the function pointer takes a void *. (Some system might use different representations for pointers of different types, or pass them in different registers.)
• Bug 1012: multiplying signed integers and then checking whether the result wrapped around. (Some system might detect the overflow and abort the process. According to the C standard, unsigned integers must silently wrap around, but signed integers might not.)
• Forward-declaring enum types and then passing pointers to them as parameters. (This is a GCC extension. The representation of such pointers could in principle depend on the set of values defined for the enum, especially if sizeof(char *) != sizeof(int *).)

It may seem strange that anyone would develop a text mode browser in a world where the power of computers keep improving and most people favor graphical applications. Most graphical browsers are slow (especially to start up) and eat a lot of memory. For some people, this is unacceptable, so avoiding these browsers to harvest your critical system resources when doing basic tasks on the net is one thing. Text browsers are also invaluable on servers without a graphical environment and over SSH (or similiar) text-only sessions. Besides, text mode browsing is fun and highly addictive when you get the hang of it. ;-)

And if you think that the current web is unbrowsable without images, you are wrong. 75% of the actual sites you visit are perfectly browsable (especially with the tables support) and another 15% are not exactly pleasant but still well-viewable. And even in text browser you can easily view individual images through some external viewer (like zgv on Linux console). Some people are actually using ELinks as their exclusive browser. However, you obviously do not need to be so extreme to still have many good practical uses for a text browser.

ELinks is not the only text browser around. There are the various other Links flavors. You might be also familiar with lynx, one of the oldest text browsers, available on many systems. You will find that a lot of the navigation keys in ELinks are similar to lynx'. There also is w3m, which has some very interesting features, such as inline images or novel control style.